Professional Communication: Consultancy, Advocacy, Activism [1st ed.] 9783030416676, 9783030416683

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COMMUNICATING IN PROFESSIONS AND ORGANIZATIONS

Professional Communication Consultancy, Advocacy, Activism

Edited by  Louise Mullany

Communicating in Professions and Organizations

Series Editor Jonathan Crichton University of South Australia Adelaide, SA, Australia

This ground-breaking series is edited by Jonathan Crichton, Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the University of South Australia. It provides a venue for research on issues of language and communication that matter to professionals, their clients and stakeholders. Books in the series explore the relevance and real world impact of communication research in professional practice and forge reciprocal links between researchers in applied linguistics/ discourse analysis and practitioners from numerous professions, including healthcare, education, business and trade, law, media, science and technology. Central to this agenda, the series responds to contemporary challenges to professional practice that are bringing issues of language and communication to the fore. These include: • The growing importance of communication as a form of professional expertise that needs to be made visible and developed as a resource for the professionals • Political, economic, technological and social changes that are transforming communicative practices in professions and organisations • Increasing mobility and diversity (geographical, technological, cultural, linguistic) of organisations, professionals and clients Books in the series combine up to date overviews of issues of language and communication relevant to the particular professional domain with original research that addresses these issues at relevant sites. The authors also explore the practical implications of this research for the professions/ organisations in question. We are actively commissioning projects for this series and welcome proposals from authors whose experience combines linguistic and professional expertise, from those who have long-standing knowledge of the professional and organisational settings in which their books are located and joint editing/authorship by language researchers and professional practitioners. The series is designed for both academic and professional readers, for scholars and students in Applied Linguistics, Communication Studies and related fields, and for members of the professions and organisations whose practice is the focus of the series. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14904

Louise Mullany Editor

Professional Communication Consultancy, Advocacy, Activism

Editor Louise Mullany School of English University of Nottingham Nottingham, UK

Communicating in Professions and Organizations ISBN 978-3-030-41667-6    ISBN 978-3-030-41668-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41668-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: KTSDESIGN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Abigail and Tommy, in the hope that you will enter professions that will treat you well and bring fulfilment to your lives in the years to come.

Preface

This volume responds to a series of political, social and technological changes that are transforming the global landscape of professional communication research. It focuses on original empirical studies carried out in a number of international locations, including Africa, Asia and Australasia, as well as Europe and North America. All contributors take innovative approaches to professional communication drawing on consultancy, advocacy and activism, or a combination of these approaches. A defining feature is that all chapters have clearly identified contemporary socio-­cultural problems that are explored and investigated by professional communication analysis. The volume includes authorial contributions from some of the most internationally respected and well-known academic researchers in professional communication, whose seminal work has helped shape the discipline over many years, including Janet Holmes, Maria Stubbe and Elena Semino. These contributions sit alongside established researchers who are transforming the field with their recent work in a variety of global spaces, along with contributions from experienced practitioners. Contributors have been carefully selected as collectively they represent emergent work across a range of different traditions in linguistics, communication studies and beyond, including: sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, intercultural communication, corpus linguistics, conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, stylistics, ethnography, pragmatics, narrative studies, law, crime and criminology, medical vii

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humanities and organisational studies. The volume also incorporates important collaborations with researchers from different fields coming together around a particular socio-cultural problem to produce genuine interdisciplinary work. The fields of businesses, healthcare and institutions, with the latter category incorporating politics, education and law, have been selected as the key domains where consultancy, advocacy and activist research is being carried out most prominently and most effectively. A series of pertinent questions are asked about the evolving relationships between researcher and researched, the changing nature of researcher identities, the negotiation of power and research reciprocity, and the impact on and subsequent development of new theories and methodologies. At the centre of these questions is the overarching importance of the production of research consultancies, advocacy and activist work, dedicated to addressing and resolving socio-cultural issues with global significance, based on the findings of robust, empirical research. The initial inspiration for this volume stems from my experiences of setting up a research consultancy and business unit at the University of Nottingham from 2015, Linguistic Profiling for Professionals. The consultancy-­style approach to professional communication research, part of a broader business and external engagement agenda for the University, has changed the relationship between the researcher and the researched in expected and unexpected ways. A variety of projects have been commissioned in different settings including businesses, the public sector, the third sector and healthcare. All have been unified by the desire to investigate and attempt to resolve particular socio-cultural problems, often around miscommunication and conflict, communication breakdown and issues of professional identity in relation to workplace equality and intercultural communicative competence. Experiences of feeding back findings and recommendations, including observing how these may or may not be taken on-board, and how the relationship between the researcher and researched develops during advocacy and activist work, have provided the impetus to explore these issues further. This includes critically considering different demands, expectations and roles that are placed on researchers and practitioners and how these emergent issues influence theoretical and methodological developments in the field. The

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resultant volume investigates all of these issues in a detailed and sustained way, drawing on the experiences and expertise of a large group of academics and practitioners. It is the intention that this work will be of long-­ term practical use, value and interest to professionals, practitioners, academics, students and scholars across the widest range of areas of professional expertise. Nottingham, UK October 2019

Louise Mullany

Acknowledgements

The last time that I saw Ronald Carter in person, we discussed the gap in the market for a volume of this nature and as always he approached the topic with his infectious enthusiasm, passion and encouragement. Although he is no longer with us, his influence runs deeply throughout this book. I will remain forever grateful to him for his mentorship, friendship and for being the best senior colleague that anyone could ever wish to work with. The book is dedicated to his memory. I also wish to express my sincere gratitude to all of the contributors who have made this volume possible. It has been a genuine pleasure to work with you all. As professional communication research reaches an important juncture in its development, it is a real positive that we have such a vibrant community of innovative researchers, consultants and practitioners who are not afraid to push the boundaries of the discipline forward. I feel very privileged to be part of this global interdisciplinary network. A particular mention to all of the practitioners who have contributed here—this volume is much richer for your insight and engagement. Working more closely on publications is certainly a productive way to ensure that professional communication research makes its way into everyday applied practice. Many thanks also to Cathy Scott, Beth Farrow and Alice Green, who have been an excellent team to work with at Springer Palgrave and to the Series Editor Jonathan Crichton, for including this volume as part of the xi

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Communicating in Professions and Organizations Series. As a team, you have provided the perfect balance of flexibility, support, encouragement and patience with this project and I am really glad that the initial idea for this volume appealed to you. I have had the pleasure of working with a wide range of professional communication academics and support staff over the last few years at the University of Nottingham as part of Linguistic Profiling for Professionals (LiPP) and I am very grateful to everyone who has been employed as part of LiPP since 2015 for their hard work, dedication and vision: Sarah Atkins, Vanessa Augustus, Gavin Brookes, Malgorzata Chalupnik, Wasim Chaudry, Luke Collins, Spencer Hazel, Claire Mann, Kay Snowley, Dimitra Vladimirou, and PhD students Tristan Emerson, Leigh Harrington and Victoria Howard. I have learnt a great deal from working alongside all of you and I am proud of what we have achieved together. Special thanks to Victoria Howard for being such a dedicated and diligent research assistant on various LiPP projects over the last three years and in particular for assisting me with formatting and proofing the final version of this manuscript. In addition to all of this volume’s contributors, thanks also to fellow academics, practitioners, industry partners, charity and NGO collaborators and administrative staff for being such supportive and inspirational colleagues: Harriet Adong, Mazz Awan, Rita Atukwasa, Jo Angouri, Sally Bowden, Cheryl Brand, Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini, Jacqueline Cordell, Zoltan Dornyei, Lucy Jones, Karen Grainger, Kevin Harvey, Jayne Henson, Paul Holmes, Sue Hopcroft, Daniel Hunt, Daniel King, Sam Kingman, Liz Lesquereux, Jai MacKenzie, Ian Mawer, Sara Mills, Gemma Morgan-Jones, Jo Murphy, Laura Murphy, Liz Morrish, Hope Nankunda, Alison Pilnick, Lucy Rowley, Karen Salt, Sally Squires, Peter Stockwell, Claire Stripp, Steve Upcraft, Kelly Vere, Marion Walker, Edward Wilding, Lucy Williams and Angela Zottola. Particular thanks to Sally Squires for the  loan of her  peaceful  garden office  in the summer of 2019. To finish, special thanks to my fellow Aikidoka at The Eagle Dojo  Nottingham for helping me find the much-needed headspace to create and work on this volume, especially to Sensei Phil Musson, who has taught me so much about the critical importance of timing, balance

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and resilience in life, work and Aikido. Lastly and most importantly, I could not do any of this without the love, support and belief of Matthew, Abigail and Tommy—you are my world.

Author and Publisher’s Acknowledgements In Chap. 4, Lumala and Mullany’s work has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through the UKRI’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), AHRC Grant number: AH/ R004439/1. In Chap. 5, Koller and Ereaut would like to thank Prostate Cancer UK for their permission to use this case study and for their permission to reproduce its original ‘Working Principles’ in this volume. In Chap. 6, Mooneeram would like to thank Accenture for their permission to use their consultancy as an illustrative example in this chapter. In Chap. 7, the research projects of Stubbe et al. were funded by the New Zealand Health Research Council, the New Zealand Lotteries Health Research Fund, the University of Otago Research Fund and the New Zealand Ministry of Health. Stubbe et al. are also grateful to the research participants and participating general practices, and to the research assistants who helped collect and transcribe the data. In Boyd et al.’s work in Chap. 8, the research of Pope et al. in Sect. 1 is based upon findings supported by the Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration, Office of Research and Development. The views expressed in Chap. 8 are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the Department of Veterans Affairs or the United States Government. Demjén and Semino’s work in Chap. 10 on end of life care and metaphor was funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, 2012–2014, ESRC grant number: ES/J007927/1. In Chap. 12, Hardaker’s work was also supported by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant number ES/L008874/1 and grant number ES/K002155/1. Mullany and Trickett’s hate crime research reported in Chap. 13 was funded by the Office of the Nottinghamshire Police and Crime Commissioner and Nottingham Women’s Centre.

Praise for Professional Communication “In this superbly edited volume, we see the problem-solving potential of a mature and committed applied linguistics, and its relevance for addressing the complexities of communication in an age of globalization.” — Jan Blommaert, Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization, Tilburg University, the Netherlands “An imperative underpinning the modes and modalities of professional communication research is to embrace a societally relevant impact agenda through intervention and influence. The editor and the contributors – committed to ‘responsive’ and ‘responsible’ research with a ‘reflexive’ mentality – rise to the practical and ethical challenges of ‘translational research’ admirably and refreshingly in linking empirically grounded research across diverse settings, domains and methodologies with their lived experiences of consultancy, advocacy and activism.” — Srikant Sarangi, Professor in Humanities and Medicine, Aalborg University, Denmark, Emeritus Professor, Cardiff University, UK

Contents

1 Rethinking Professional Communication: New Departures for Global Workplace Research  1 Louise Mullany Part I Businesses and Organisations  27 2 Training ‘International Engineers’ in Japan: discourse, Discourse and Stereotypes 29 Michael Handford 3 The Relevance of Applied Linguistic and Discourse Research: On the Margins of Communication Consultancy 47 Erika Darics 4 Language, Gender and Leadership: Applying the Sociolinguistics of Narrative and Identity in East Africa 65 Masibo Lumala and Louise Mullany

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5 Culture Change and Rebranding in the Charity Sector: A Linguistic Consultancy Approach 89 Veronika Koller and Gill Ereaut 6 The Practitioner’s View: The Value of Linguistics in International Business Consultancy113 Roshni Mooneeram Part II Healthcare 127 7 Talking About Diabetes and Healthy Lifestyle in Primary Healthcare—Translating Research Findings into Practice129 Maria Stubbe, Lindsay Macdonald, Rachel Tester, Lesley Gray, Jo Hilder, Kevin Dew, and Tony Dowell 8 Speaking of Digital Communication: Home-Based Telehealth for Patients and Providers151 Boyd H. Davis, Kathryn Van Ravenstein, and Charlene Pope 9 Communication Accommodation Theory as an Intervention Tool to Improve Interprofessional Practice in Healthcare169 Bernadette M. Watson 10 Communicating Nuanced Results in Language Consultancy: The Case of Cancer and the Violence Metaphor191 Zsófia Demjén and Elena Semino 11 ‘We Might Have a Conversation Once a Week but the Quality Is High’: Research and Consultancy in Primary Care Multidisciplinary Teams211 Claire Mann

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Part III Institutions: Politics, Law and Education 225 12 Social Media Interventions and the Language of Political Campaigns: From Online Petitions to Platform Policy Changes227 Claire Hardaker 13 The Language of ‘Misogyny Hate Crime’: Politics, Policy and Policing249 Louise Mullany and Loretta Trickett 14 Changing Educational Policies: Language and Sexuality in Schools273 Helen Sauntson 15 Towards an Understanding of Linguistic Consultancy: How Do Linguists Approach the Task of Evaluating Sociolinguistic Practice in Consultancy Sessions?291 Kieran File and Stephanie Schnurr 16 The View from Outside: Communicating Influence and Organisational Change: Reflections from a Police Chief Constable311 Susannah Fish Part IV Epilogue 325 17 Epilogue: Future Directions—What Next?327 Janet Holmes Index343

Notes on Contributors

Erika Darics  is Senior Lecturer in English at Aston University, UK. She is an applied linguist specialising in communication in professional, workplace and digital contexts. Drawing on her research and extensive training experience she works with businesses and organisations to realise their business potential by improving their communications through business consultancy. As a researcher she is particularly interested in professional (and) interpersonal communication in workplaces, including non-verbal communication, politeness, relational and gendered communication. She specialises in computer-­ mediated communication and social media. She is regional Vice President for Europe, Africa and the Middle East for the Association for Business Communication. Boyd H. Davis  is Professor of Applied Linguistics at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA. Her research focuses on sociohistorical and pragmatic approaches to healthcare, including dementia discourse, ageing and digital corpora. She is Co-PI of the Carolinas Conversation Collection, an NIH-funded web portal for researchers to several hundred conversational interviews with impaired/unimpaired older persons. Zsófia Demjén  is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at University College London, UK, and specialises in language and communication around illness and healthcare. She is author of Sylvia Plath and the xxi

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Language of Affective States (2015), co-author of Metaphor, Cancer and the End of Life: A Corpus-based Study (2018), editor of Applying Linguistics in Illness and Healthcare Contexts (2019), and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language (2017). Her work has appeared in the Journal of Pragmatics, Applied Linguistics, Communication & Medicine, and the BMJ’s Medical Humanities, among others. Kevin Dew  is Professor of Sociology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is a founding member of the Applied Research on Communication in Health (ARCH) Group. His current research activities include studies of interactions between health professionals and patients, health inequities in cancer care decision-making, and the social meanings of medications. His books include The Cult and Science of Public Health: A Sociological Investigation, Borderland Practices: Regulating Alternative Therapy in New Zealand, Sociology of Health in New Zealand (with Allison Kirkman), and Public Health, Personal Health and Pills: Drug Entanglements and Pharmaceuticalised Governance. Tony Dowell  is Professor of Primary Health Care and General Practice at the University of Otago in Wellington, New Zealand. He is a founding member of the ARCH Group and co-directs the ARCH Corpus of Health Interactions. He is a practising GP and has worked in New Zealand, the UK and Central Africa. He undertakes research in community settings using quantitative and qualitative methodologies to investigate primary mental healthcare, communication between patients and health providers and the application of complexity and implementation science in healthcare settings. Gill  Ereaut  is Founding Partner and CEO of Linguistic Landscapes, where she has pioneered the commercial application of language sciences, linguistics and discourse analysis to a range of organisations. She has 30 years of experience working in business research and consulting. She writes and speaks regularly on the topics of language and ­organisations, including guest lecturing at Cass Business School and the London School of Economics.

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Kieran File  is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick, UK. His research explores issues related to language use in high-performance sporting contexts. His current research interests are in the areas of managing professional relationships in sports teams, building empowering team environments and the strategies professional sports managers and coaches use to manage their impressions when speaking to the media. He also applies this research and has helped some of the world’s biggest sporting teams and organisations consider the role and impact of language choices in their high performance sporting contexts. Susannah Fish, OBE, QPM  is CEO of StarFish Consulting Limited, working with a range of clients on transformational change, leadership and equality in the UK. Previously she was a police officer for 31 years and retired as Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire Police. She was awarded the OBE in 2008 for services to policing. She received the Queen’s Policing Medal for distinguished service in 2016. She was also awarded ‘Upstander of the Year’ in the National Hate Crime Awards 2017 for her leadership on misogyny hate crime. She continues to campaign to have misogyny hate crime adopted nationally. Lesley Gray  is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Otago in Wellington, New Zealand, and a fellow of the UK Faculty of Public Health. She is a member of the ARCH Group and led the formation of the TabOO study (Talking About Overweight & Obesity). Her research interests concern health risk communication and behaviour relating to obesity, health equity and disaster risk reduction (DRR), and research into interprofessional education and community informed learning. Michael  Handford is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Cardiff University, UK, where he is Director of Internationalisation for the School of English, Communication and Philosophy. His published work focuses on discourse in professional settings, cultural identities at work, the application of corpus tools in discourse analysis, using corpora for the analysis of intercultural communication, English as a Lingua Franca in the construction industry, engineering education, and language learning.

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He was previously Professor of International Education at the University of Tokyo, and has worked as a communication consultant with several organisations. Claire  Hardaker  is Senior Lecturer in Forensic Corpus Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK. She researches online aggression, deception and manipulation; directs the Forensic Linguistics Research Group (FORGE); and produces a podcast on forensic linguistics and language mysteries called ‘en clair’. She is also part of the ESRC’s Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) Centre. Jo  Hilder  is a Research Fellow based in the Department of Primary Health Care and General Practice at the University of Otago in Wellington, New Zealand. With a background in applied linguistics, she is a member of the ARCH Group which investigates a wide range of communication issues in clinical practice using video recordings of authentic interactions between health professionals and patients. Janet Holmes  is Emeritus Professor in Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and an officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (2016). She is Associate Director of the Wellington Language in the Workplace project, an ongoing study of communication in the workplace which has described small talk, humour, management strategies, directives and leadership in a wide range of New Zealand workplaces. She was also Director of the project which produced the influential Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English. Veronika Koller  is Reader in Discourse Studies at Lancaster University, UK. Her research interests centre on corporate and health communication and she supervises a number of PhD students in these areas. Outside academia, she is a senior associate analyst with the consulting company Linguistic Landscapes. She has been involved in the rebranding of the charity Prostate Cancer UK as well as in projects for the NHS and a number of UK-based and international charities. Her published works

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include Language in Business, Language at Work (Palgrave 2018, with Erika Darics) and Metaphor and Gender in Business Media Discourse (Palgrave, 2004). Masibo Lumala  is a Senior Lecturer at Moi University’s Department of Communication Studies, Kenya, where he specialises in gender, communication, writing for public relations and strategic corporate media relations. He is actively involved in advocacy and campaigns and has successfully supervised a number of Masters and PhD students in a range of areas including gender, media and political communication in Kenya. Lindsay Macdonald  is an adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Otago in Wellington, New Zealand. She is a founding member of the ARCH Group and co-director of the ARCH Corpus of Health Interactions. She has brought her clinical background in nursing to a wide range of applied research projects on health communication and health promotion in the primary healthcare domain. Claire  Mann  is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Pharmacy working closely with the Nottingham University Business School’s Centre for Health Improvement, Leadership and Learning (CHILL) at the University of Nottingham, UK.  She is an interdisciplinary researcher who has worked on a number of research projects in various clinical settings across the fields of medicine and health sciences. She specialises in ethnographic approaches to education and healthcare. She also works as a freelance consultant and research practitioner in evaluation, education, organisational behaviour and professional communication. Roshni Mooneeram  is a freelance communication strategist and consultant in corporate training. She specialises in global Englishes in the workplace, multilingualism and workplace identities. She has also worked at the University of Leeds, Birmingham City University and the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, where she founded and directed the Division of English Studies.

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Louise  Mullany  is Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Nottingham, UK. She is founder and director of Linguistic Profiling for Professionals, a research consultancy and business unit based at the University. She specialises in sociolinguistic investigations of professional identities and workplace cultures. Her works have been published widely with a range of international publishing houses. Books include Gendered Discourse in the Professional Workplace (2007, Palgrave) and Language, Gender and Feminism (2011 with Sara Mills). She has delivered research consultancies and training to numerous public, private and third sector organisations. She is editor of Routledge’s monograph book series Applied Professional Communication. Charlene Pope, PhD, MPH, RN, FAAN,  is Chief Nurse for Research at the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center, USA, where she conducts health services research on health disparities, patient-provider communication and health literacy. She is Co-PI of the Carolinas Conversation Collection, an NIH-funded web portal for researchers to several hundred conversational interviews with impaired/unimpaired older persons. Helen  Sauntson  is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at York St John University, UK. Her research areas are language in education and language, gender and sexuality. She is the author of Language, Sexuality and Education (2018), Approaches to Gender and Spoken Classroom Discourse (Palgrave, 2012), co-author of New Perspectives on Language and Sexual Identity (Palgrave, 2007). She has also co-edited a number of volumes and her work has appeared in a wide range of academic journals. She is co-editor of the Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality book series. Stephanie  Schnurr is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, UK. Her main research interests are professional and medical communication with a particular interest in leadership discourse, culture and gender. She has published widely on these topics. She is also the author of Leadership Discourse at Work (Palgrave, 2009), Exploring Professional Communication (2013), Language and Culture at Work (2017

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with O.  Zayts) and The Language of Leadership Narratives (2020 with J. Clifton and D. van de Mieroop). Elena  Semino is Professor of Linguistics and Verbal Art in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK, and Director of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science. She holds a Visiting Professorship at the University of Fuzhou in China. She specialises in corpus linguistics, medical humanities, health communication, stylistics, narratology and metaphor theory and analysis. She has co-authored over 90 academic publications, including Metaphor in Discourse (2008), Figurative Language, Genre and Register (2013), and Metaphor, Cancer and the End of Life: A Corpus-based Study (2018). Maria  Stubbe is an Associate Professor at University of Otago in Wellington, New Zealand. She leads the ARCH Group which investigates communication issues in clinical practice using video recordings of authentic interactions between health professionals and patients. She is an interactional sociolinguist and qualitative health researcher. and has published widely in the fields of pragmatics, language in the workplace and health communication. Rachel  Tester is a Research Fellow at the University of Otago in Wellington, New Zealand. She is a part of the ARCH Group, and manages a service user education and research group ‘World of Difference’. Her research includes studies of health communication, and projects with a mental health and addictions focus that draw on the power of personal narratives to help raise awareness about the social, cultural and political drivers of mental distress. Loretta Trickett  is Associate Professor of Criminal and Human Rights Law and Criminology at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research interests are in gendered victimisation and hate crime. She has undertaken research on fear of crime, bullying, gangs, hate crime and policing. She has published extensively in these areas. She is a member of a number

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of steering groups and community organisations on hate crime and victimisation. Kathryn Van Ravenstein  works as a teacher on Chamberlain University’s online programmes in the USA, and she is a former Assistant Professor at  the Medical University of South Carolina, USA.  She has a diverse nurse practitioner background, having practised in the areas of family and internal medicine, urology, orthopedics, cardiovascular surgery and community health. Her primary research interest is in using technology to manage chronic diseases. Bernadette  M.  Watson  is Professor of Health Communication and Director of the International Research Centre for the Advancement of Health Communication (IRCAHC) in the Department of English at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. She is a health psychologist who studies communication. She researches the influence of identity and intergroup processes both on patient-health professional communication and on communication in multidisciplinary and multicultural health teams. Her research focus is in the area of language and social psychology and she has been a member of the International Association of Language and Social Psychology executive since 2000 and was President between 2012 and 2014.

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 12.1 Fig. 12.2 Fig. 14.1 Fig. 14.2 Fig. 14.3

Extract 1: A customer engaging in webchat with ESHOP live Flows of discourse (Ereaut 2012) PCUK’s working principles, first iteration 2011 ‘Participants’, by Kathryn Van Ravenstein, 2018 Sample feedback model of CP-centred interprofessional communication in a MDT Primary Care context Mentions and retweets of @CCriadoPerez by others Tweets to and retweets of @CCriadoPerez Local Government Act 1988 Clause 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act Comparison of Clause 28 and current RSE documents

53 93 100 159 218 233 239 283 284 284

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List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 3.1 Table 5.1 Table 8.1 Table 8.2 Table 12.1

Trainee autostereotypes and heterostereotypes 37 Kirkpatrick’s four levels 41 Positions adopted by tweet writers 57 Working principles for PCUK (training content 2011/12) 103 Exemplars of semantic themes across the interview dataset 158 Gesture and text in Story-Call analysis 163 Number of tweets in each section of the Criado-Perez Complete Corpus (CPCC) 232 Table 14.1 Keywords in 2019 RSE corpus 281 Table 14.2 Concordance of promot∗285

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1 Rethinking Professional Communication: New Departures for Global Workplace Research Louise Mullany

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Professional Communication: Changing Landscapes

The socio-political importance of conducting professional communication research in contemporary societies cannot be under-estimated. Over 20 years ago, Gunnarsson et al. (1997: 1) pointed out that efficient communication in the professions ‘is absolutely vital for society to function properly’. Since the time of this publication, in the highly digitised, globalised world, effective professional communication is arguably even more critical to the robustness of social, political and economic functions of societies worldwide. But how do professional communication researchers feed their research findings into professional contexts? At what stage in the research process should this happen? What is the relationship between the researcher and researched? What happens to the identity of the ‘researcher’ in such a process? What topics and professions should be L. Mullany (*) University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 L. Mullany (ed.), Professional Communication, Communicating in Professions and Organizations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41668-3_1

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researched? How can professional communication researchers genuinely work with, for and on behalf of others, including marginalised and/or vulnerable groups? What roles do/should researchers’ own political beliefs play in influencing research questions, the direction of projects and how findings are interpreted and disseminated? What about the role of the ‘impact agenda’ and other, similar agendas that have affected multiple universities in different parts of the world (Lawson and Sayers 2016; McIntyre and Price 2018)? This collection aims to investigate these questions in a range of global contexts through three different yet interrelated approaches: ‘consultancy’, ‘advocacy’ and ‘activism’. Professional communication work drawing upon one or more of these approaches is presented in each chapter to identify, analyse and assess the changing practices of professional communication research due to considerable social, cultural and political transitions taking place in contemporary societies. The volume’s authors demonstrate how different practices of conducting professional communication research via consultancies and/or forms of advocacy and activism have emerged through changing research priorities, partly in response to the rapidly shifting landscape of higher education, including the increased marketisation of universities within neoliberal economies (De Costa 2016; Morrish and Saunston 2019). ‘Professional communication’ is defined in this volume as an umbrella term to cover approaches within language, linguistics and communication studies where research in professional settings takes place. A broad definition of ‘professional’ has been adopted, conceptualised as any individual who has a workplace role responsibility, including all interactions between lay person(s) and those who occupy professional role responsibilities. This expands upon earlier definitions, including the influential notion whereby a ‘professional’ was defined as any individual engaged in paid work (Gunnarsson et  al. 1997). The wider definition taken here enables studies of those engaged in non-paid work, including voluntary occupations with charities and NGOs to be included, as well as those who engage in work but who do not know with any degree of certainty that this will be financially rewarded, as in agriculture in developing countries (discussed in Chap. 4). In terms of defining ‘communication’, again, a broad definition is taken, inclusive of approaches from applied

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linguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis (CDA), conversation analysis, ethnography, stylistics and pragmatics, enabling a range of perspectives and approaches to be covered. The defining principle for professional communication research in this volume is that, whatever geographical location it is taking place in, the authors place investigation of a particular socio-cultural problem at its core, which is then empirically investigated. The exact focus of the socio-­ cultural problem may be decided at the beginning, or it may be emergent during empirical work; it may be jointly negotiated and collaboratively developed between the researcher(s) and researched and/or with remits and stipulations of funding bodies, or in discussion with those commissioning research consultancies, and/or with those granting access to research sites as gatekeepers. All of these processes can be fraught with complexities, which will be discussed at relevant points in the volume (see also Mullany 2008; Cook 2012). However, the foundational principle of socio-cultural problem-solving through empirical investigation sits at the core of all chapters; in my view, this foundational principle should be at the centre of all work that is carried out in the global field of professional communication research. There are some echoes of sociolinguistic and CDA traditions here, with Labov’s (1982) view that social problems have been core to his sociolinguistic work and studies influenced by his tradition. Fairclough and Wodak (1997: 271) list addressing ‘social problems’ as a core principle of CDA research. However, as Roberts and Sarangi (2003) point out, although the topics of CDA research are social problems, traditionally, CDA researchers do not prioritise coming up with practically relevant feedback, interventions or recommendations to change future practices. Professional communication research which includes a practical engagement element of feeding back to those being researched is in itself not new. Within applied linguistics, in language learning and second language acquisition in particular, a core focus has been on enhancing teaching and learning practices through empirical research, including advocacy and activism (see de Costa 2016 for an excellent overview of contemporary work in this area). In sociolinguistic research, there has been a longstanding set of principles for advocacy work. This includes the principle

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of ‘linguistic gratuity’ (Wolfram 1993), that researchers should ‘repay’ those they research and the advocacy principles of Labov (1982), based on his role as an expert witness in a case successfully challenging part of the US educational system for linguistic discrimination. Furthermore, Cameron et al.’s (1992) proclamation to empower those being researched by working ‘with’ and ‘for’ research participants instead of ‘on’ is still influential. Sarangi and Roberts (1999) and Roberts and Sarangi (2003) trailblazed with their reflexive research consultancies in commissioned healthcare projects in the UK on linguistic discrimination, described as ‘action-orientated’ research; The work of Candlin (2003) demonstrated perspectives from those officially working ‘within’ professions as ‘insiders’, where they applied practical linguistic tools to workplace issues that they identified ethnographically, when carrying out their everyday job roles. Whilst the historical development of professional communication research from a variety of linguistic traditions and approaches shows the trajectory of early research and its importance at the foundation of the discipline, the academic landscape has changed significantly in the last two decades and is quite unrecognisable to the one that existed in the 1980s and 1990s, when initial work was being undertaken. Academics have been increasingly held to account in terms of exactly how they are spending their research time, who they are researching and why; research with clear, demonstrable, measurable ‘impact’ on populations is becoming more essential if research funding bids are to be successful. This transition can be seen in a growing number of university systems in different global locations (cf. McIntyre and Price 2018; McEnery 2018). In order to ensure that cutting-edge communications data is analysed, which most accurately reflects the complex communicative processes in twenty-first century professional life, the focus will be across spoken, written and digital forms. The landscape of professional communication has changed dramatically in the last ten years, with the advent of social media and a range of other interactive digital communicative forms, including instant messaging and professional communication interactions through global media platforms. Public self-images of businesses, individuals and organisations are under constant scrutiny by the general public and the mass media. The digital professional landscape continues to change rapidly,

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with communicative norms almost constantly transitioning. Professionals and organisations need to adapt swiftly to new communicative skills with differing socio-cultural norms and conventions. Digital data will be considered at various points in the collection across a variety of domains. Additionally, as part of ensuring that this collection broadens the field and is of long-term use and value to its readership, this volume incorporates chapter contributions from practitioners working on professional communication in a range of fields, including businesses, healthcare and law. This takes place alongside academic contributors working as research consultants, advocates and/or activists as part of their academic role responsibilities. Practitioner contributions are from established experts in their fields of practice (Ereaut, Mooneeram, Mann and Fish). They bring a different set of perspectives to the collection and, in my view, it is very beneficial to integrate the voices of practitioners alongside those of academics if we are truly committed to making research evidence count in real-life professional settings. It is integral to understand the approaches of those who apply research findings into consultancy and workplace  training packages on a day-to-day basis. These practitioners are united by their ability to see the value of working with practical tools and techniques from language, linguistics and communication studies, either to enhance their consultancy training in professional workplace practices and/or to bring academic value to particular campaigns or cases. These authors offer innovative perspectives on how collaborations can be conducted to enhance dialogue and working relationships between academics, practitioners, professionals and members of the public. This collection thus brings together a unique set of international authors who engage in a set of original, empirical investigations which place a series of important contemporary socio-cultural problems at the centre of their research. A range of linguistic approaches are taken and the chapters pose new and different challenges to the field, particularly in light of everchanging, global landscapes in academia and organisational practice (cf. Price 2018; Darics forthcoming, 2021). The current collection highlights multiple ways in which professional communication research can be carried out successfully as forms of consultancy, advocacy and activism. These approaches draw upon differing professional relationships and role responsibilities for academics and practitioners with those being researched/

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consulted. The process of genuinely  collaborating with the researched/ consulted comes with its own complex theoretical and methodological challenges. This volume presents an important opportunity for these issues to be discussed and debated. I will now move on to define how the terms ‘consultancy’, ‘advocacy’ and ‘activism’ are applied here, before outlining the professional domains focused on across this collective work.

2

Consultancy, Advocacy, Activism

In this volume, ‘consultancy’ is defined as professional communication research where academics and/or practitioners conduct a particular project with a specific area of focus set by an individual, group or organisation who has valued their expertise enough to request their input. Most often, this will involve practitioners, researchers or their institution being paid in some capacity for their time and expertise; however, on occasion, consultancies may be given as part of ‘in-kind’ contributions, or delivered free of charge (see also Demjén and Semino, this volume). There are a range of different topics upon which linguistics consultancies can be carried out but, as already outlined above, the unifying factor of this volume is that all contributors are committed to addressing a particular socio-­cultural problem and are attempting to make a positive social change, as well as positively influencing the future development of professional communication research and practice. Consultancy most often takes place through a process of often complex collaboration with a stakeholder in order to fully understand and address the socio-cultural issue at hand. There is an expectation that a set of oral or written recommendations/opinions will be part of the process and often consultants can play a role in the implementation of recommendations through training or other activities. The move towards universities accepting funding for academics to carry out consultancies as an alternative income-stream, part of the marketisation of Higher Education, is fraught with a series of ethical considerations and challenges. It is essential to not just produce research which can be paid for independently by consultants, or for academic research freedom to be imposed upon or restricted by those who are funding consultancies. On occasion, it will be entirely appropriate and relevant to produce research for

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those who are not in any position to pay for research consultancy or public engagement work. Alternative funding could be provided by governmentbased research councils (Lumala and Mullany, this volume), charities (Boyd et  al., this volume), NGOs or via in-kind or pro-bono contributions. Indeed, it is one of the aims of this volume to illustrate the wide variety of approaches that can be taken to producing research consultancies, and engaging in advocacy and activist work. As a part of this consideration, it is essential that, as well as being collaborative and reciprocal with those who are being researched/consulted, researchers also need to be given an independent space to question the status quo, expose power imbalances and exploitation, and report on unfavourable findings if they are discovered. This includes being able to resist pressures that may be imposed by consultancy clients who wish for a particular version of findings to be told, which may be at odds with the findings of the empirical research itself and/or the political and moral views of the researcher (see Mullany 2008). In terms of differing practical routes through which research consultancies can be carried out and how this affects researcher identities, there are authors in this volume who retain their academic role within their own universities, whilst also being contractually employed as an official external research consultant by a particular organisation (Handford; File and Schnurr); this can include academics taking on separate, external job contracts by becoming official employees of an external consultancy, as in Koller’s collaborative work and employment with Ereaut’s innovative company, Linguistic Landscapes (see Koller and Ereaut); another model is of academics continuing in their own university role but having a separate consultancy business set up in its own right, where they acquire consultancy contracts in collaboration with other consultancy firms or individuals, separate, yet interrelated to their academic role (Darics). A further approach is where academics leave academia completely and set up independent business consultancies (Mooneeram). This model is particularly interesting as it enables an individual to draw on contemporary knowledge and skills of academic research in consultancy delivery, given credibility due to their previous academic researcher identity, with the freedom to operate without the constraints of an academic employer. Other practitioner consultancies in this volume are from authors who have addressed specific socio-cultural problems through professional

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communication reflection and analysis, influenced by the value of interdisciplinary approaches (Mann; Fish). Consultancy research can also take place through academics performing consultancy roles as part of funded research projects, most often when feeding back findings and recommendations in what is currently referred to as research impact and/or public engagement with a wide variety of stakeholders (Stubbe et al.; Boyd et al.; Watson; Demjén and Semino; Hardaker; Mullany and Trickett; Sauntson); most often this work is funded by established research councils, the public sector, healthcare organisations, charities or equivalent sponsors. There is variation amongst approaches in terms of how much consultancy takes place in different settings, along with variation in levels of advocacy and activism (see below). Consultancies can vary in length, from shorter-term interventions focused on investigating one particular socio-cultural problem (Darics; Mullany and Trickett; File and Schnurr), to medium-term projects (Mooneeram; Stubbe et al.; Boyd et al.) through to much longer consultancy projects where relationships develop over time; in these cases there will be reciprocal value on both sides and consultancy relationships can continue over a number of years, as different socio-cultural problems and issues get addressed (Handford; Koller and Ereaut). Taken together, the consultancy approaches in this volume represent new ways of working, including the development of differing theoretical and methodological approaches, the establishment of different relationships between the researcher/practitioner and the researched/consulted through roles as consultants, advocates and/or activists. These transitions in research and practice will be thoroughly explored and illustrated from various perspectives. The boundaries between researcher and researched can become blurred during consultancies, and this can place challenging demands on the researcher in terms of their identity, ethics and integrity (see Darics this volume; Darics forthcoming, 2021; Mullany forthcoming, 2021); consultancies can consist of a variety of methods in terms of the implementation of findings, including engaging and delivering post-­ research training, advocacy work, and/or as a form of activism, either in collaboration with or on behalf of professional groups or lay persons who are engaging in professional communication interaction. I will now move on to define advocacy and activism in more detail.

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Advocacy in this collection is defined as professional communication researchers or practitioners actively giving public support to an idea, course of action, or the expression of a belief in a particular position in response to a socio-cultural problem. Such public support is most often articulated through the lens of empirical research findings, which provide independent evidence for the position being argued. Advocacy work tends to take place once consultancies have been completed and when research results are ready for dissemination (though there are exceptions to this pattern). Public support can be manifested in a variety of ways, most often via contributions in mass media outlets, public speaking and invitations to participate in particular events, such as being an expert witness. Historically, Labov (1982) justified his courtroom advocacy work on the principle of ‘debt incurred’, defined as debt he accrued when researching a particular community, which should then be repaid by the researcher working on behalf of the researched when they most need you to do so. This is a very different power relationship between the researcher and researched to that in most contemporary consultancies. Labov has been critiqued for his positivistic approach to research, informed by his principle of ‘error correction’—a duty to report errors when we discover the ‘truth’. This approach implies that there is an objective truth to be found, which has been long contested by a number of researchers from more qualitative research traditions (see Cameron et  al. 1992 for a detailed discussion). Furthermore, in Labov’s work, informants were voluntary members of the public, often from marginalised groups, who gave up their own time to take part in interviews where linguistic data was elicited. In contrast, some of the work reported on in this volume has been commissioned and funded by organisations and individuals paying directly for research consultancy, and thus they can, in principle, negotiate power, the direction of the research and how this is most appropriately fed back to those being researched, as power relationships become fluid as they are more reciprocally navigated by the ‘researcher’ and ‘researched’. Cameron et al. (1993) have questioned whether ‘experts’ should even be engaging in advocacy work where they talk on behalf of other groups, or whether they should instead be investing time empowering groups to talk on behalf of themselves. I would argue that a particularly powerful

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position is academics and practitioners working in direct collaboration with members of communities who have been ‘researched’ to address their views on socio-cultural problems—talking together as multiple voices on shared platforms can be particularly effective, providing that academics are careful not to voice the concerns of others for them (see Mullany and Trickett, this volume). This may not always be possible, but what is key here is that academics and practitioners are reflexive about the amount of institutional power that their voices and opinions can hold in society and that they do not talk on behalf of others when it would be more effective and appropriate to let professionals and lay persons speak for themselves. Overall, I firmly agree with De Costa’s (2016) argument that there is a need for much greater advocacy work for the communities that researchers serve. Heavily interrelated with advocacy is the notion of ‘activism’, defined as where researchers and/or practitioners actively engage in campaigning to bring about socio-cultural change on a particular issue. Activism most often places emphasis on academics and practitioners drawing on their research findings to directly inform campaigns that aim to bring about social, political and/or cultural change. Advocacy and activism very often blend into one another and can be most effectively viewed as part of a continuum—it can be tricky to draw exact boundaries between the two. Examples of activist scholarship include investigating areas where one already has a strong political leaning (Silberstein 2016). Engagement in activist scholarship can include participating in campaigns through the mass media, writing editorials and position pieces, engaging in public campaigns including conferences, addressing public meetings of stakeholders, and visibly engaging in campaigns on social media by actively expressing views associated with one’s professional role responsibility, for example, actively articulating one’s alignment and support with a particular campaign. There are echoes of CDA again here and Fairclough’s (1989, 1995) view that there is no such thing as ‘objectivity’ in linguistics research; all researchers are influenced by particular political positions that they hold and thus such positions should be transparently articulated. Silberstein (2016) argues that the crucial consideration with both activism and advocacy is the need to be certain that findings have been reached

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independently of any sponsors’ desires and needs and that they stand up to the rigour and robustness of disciplinary standards. This point is particularly important with consultancy work where the boundaries between the researcher and researched blur, and it becomes essential for reflexive approaches to be taken throughout the research consultancy process. Silberstein (2016) discusses the degree to which researchers have a political responsibility to circulate their research results as widely as possible in public spheres by engaging in a variety of dissemination activities, for example, actively seeking out media coverage, publishing editorials and creating joint collaborative events with communities who have been researched. There is variation in what this work looks like in practice in this volume, though many contributors are unified by the desire to work towards social equity to enhance human behaviour in a variety of professional settings; some researchers and practitioners directly engage in advocacy and activist work quite explicitly to achieve these goals.

3

Professional Domains

This collection has been split into three different sections to represent, in my view, the most important domains where socio-cultural problems have been investigated in professional communication research in recent years, and where consultancy, advocacy and activism can be most usefully drawn upon: Businesses, healthcare and institutions. Whilst all three terms will be clearly defined, it is worth pointing out at this stage that the category of ‘institutions’ is being used in this volume in a narrower sense than other researchers have previously (e.g., Sarangi and Roberts 1999) to focus on studies of professional communication in public sector occupations of politics, education and law enforcement. Digital communication is present across all three sections, representing its increased importance in everyday communicative practices within professions (discussed above in Sect. 1). Across these three categories, a wide range of domains are examined from the perspectives of consultancy, advocacy and activism, representing a variety of relationships between participants, differing power relationships and differing contexts.

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In order to take a more global perspective, the volume includes new empirical data from authors who have been working on multinational professional contexts where intercultural communication is key, as well as data taken from other geographical locations, including professional communication research sites in Australia (Watson), Japan (Handford), Hong Kong (Watson), Kenya (Lumala and Mullany), Mauritius (Mooneeraam), New Zealand (Stubbe et al.; Holmes), The Philippines (Darics) and Uganda (Lumala and Mullany), as well as the UK and the US.  Furthermore, many of the chapters have clear global applicability and relevance, and a number of authors have explicitly foregrounded the global applicability of their work within their chapters, reaching far beyond their original research context. I will now move on to discuss how the three different parts of the book are defined and constructed, including the key global themes that emerge.

3.1

Businesses

As the book’s first part on professional communication, the domain of ‘businesses’ is defined as any ‘commercial organisation’, following the influential work of Bargiela et al. (2007). Businesses can vary dramatically in size from just one person, as is the case with sole entrepreneurship (see Lumala and Mullany), through to large multinationals, with significant numbers of employees in multiple countries (Handford; Darics; Mooneeram) along with various sizes of businesses in-between, including national organisations (Koller and Ereaut). The different types of businesses that are covered here range from large corporates that have been established for some time  (e.g.,  Handford; Mooneeraam), through to emergent workplaces, including social enterprises, charities and NGOs (Darics; Lumala and Mullany). We begin the investigation of the domain of businesses in Japan, with Handford’s research consultancy with a large multinational engineering firm. Handford examines the discourse of engineering professionals in Chap. 2 and focuses on intercultural communication (ICC) difficulties in relation to trainees and upper-level managers. This consultancy was commissioned in response to the organisation wishing to train their engineers to become ‘global’ professionals, who had not just technical

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capabilities, but also a set of proficient global communications skills that they could use with multiple audiences. Handford outlines the sociocultural problem of the reification of essentialist, nationalist stereotypes, which still abound in business training materials and within the engineering firm in question. He details this long-term consultancy, including a reflective account of opening up space for the empowerment of trainees (cf. Cameron et al. 1992). Handford details the findings of the consultancy research and the subsequent training that took place, led by himself and his colleague, Hiro Tanaka, which aimed to question stereotypes and get trainees and senior managers to view professional identities as dynamic rather than fixed. Overall, Handford argues for a new model of organisational discourse around ‘internationalisation’ in this organisation and beyond, drawing on key principles from discourse analysis. He makes a convincing case that it is time to move away from nationalistic, essentialist stereotypes as these bring lasting damage to ICC. His innovative model has broad applicability to global business settings where ICC plays a key role in workplace interactions (see also Holmes, Chap. 17, for a discussion of the importance of ICC and interculturality in future professional communication work). In Chap. 3, Darics brings in two commissioned business research consultancies, one international and one local, where she has been employed as a professional communication expert. The first focuses on an emergent form of digital business language, analysing socio-cultural problems that emerged in ‘webchat’ with customers from a global online market retailer. This consultancy was designed to troubleshoot instances of communication breakdown between call centre operators and customers. Whilst the market retail organisation is based in the US, it is a global corporate employer which outsources its call centre work to the Philippines. Due to geographical and linguistic differences, the Quality Assurance part of the business dictates that call centre operators use scripted dialogue for fulfilling parts of their professional role responsibility. Darics analyses ICC between professional call centre operators who are non-native speakers of English and the company’s customers in the US who are native English speakers, focusing upon communication breakdown, the role played by scripted dialogue and how miscommunication could  be avoided in future. Darics’s second business is from a very different context, a

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UK-based hospice, where a recently formed income generation team was struggling to meet its financial targets. Here, her expertise was sought to identify and recommend changes to rectify communication problems that were being experienced by the new team. The research consultancy was also designed to enhance communication and engagement with the general public, particularly on social media. Darics discusses both consultancies candidly and critically, from the perspective of the competing demands of research rigour. She focuses on the importance of maintaining academic credibility on the one hand and how this intersects with the competing needs of consultancy clients on the other. Overall, she argues for more interdisciplinary collaborations and for greater efforts to connect academic and practitioner interests within consultancy approaches, including more self-reflection on the relevance of academic work and how this can be practically acknowledged in professional practice. She draws attention to occasions where consultancy partnerships have led to research findings being ignored, misinterpreted or misapplied (cf. Candlin and Sarangi 2004). She concludes the chapter by revisiting the tensions between academic and consultancy research, ideally so that empirical research can retain its academic integrity and rigour, as well as attempting to maximise potential impact for the professions under study. In Chap. 4, Lumala and Mullany examine language, gender and leadership by focusing on women entrepreneurs in the developing economies of Kenya and Uganda. As opposed to being a form of consultancy, this project is funded by a national research council from the UK Government’s Global Challenges Research Fund, and is a form of research advocacy and activism. They examine a range of occupations which are under-researched from a professional communication perspective: farming, rural and urban market trading, the development of women-led co-operatives, social entrepreneurship initiatives, including the development of innovative IT training organisations for women and the development of women’s professional empowerment groups through NGOs. The NGO empowerment groups incorporate clear and effective communication strategies around health, human rights and the roles and ambitions for women and girls within future workplaces, as part of a number of community-based initiatives, including within schools.

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Lumala and Mullany’s work illustrates how the sociolinguistics of narrative can create and provide a powerful set of advocacy and activist devices in professional domains where women are actively seeking new opportunities in previously male-dominated workplaces. Lumala and Mullany examine the power of narratives of personal experience, focusing on stories of career development as tools of inspiration and mentorship for women embarking upon professional careers who have no previous experience of doing so in public spaces. They also reflect upon their own roles as advocates and activists for gender equality in professional workplaces and how practical attempts at bringing about social and cultural changes in emergent workplaces have fared, particularly where women are placed at the centre of these professional initiatives. Next is Koller and Ereaut’s collaborative consultancy work in a UK third sector context, focusing on the charity Prostrate Cancer UK. As highlighted above in Sect. 2, Ereaut’s consultancy Linguistic Landscapes operates outside of academia and Koller, on this occasion, was working alongside her as a freelance linguistics consultant and as one of Linguistic Landscapes’ employees. In Chap. 5, they report on their consultancy work as Prostrate Cancer UK underwent significant ‘rebranding’ as part of a process of organisational change. This change was designed to improve its income generation to increase the reach and effectiveness of the charity’s work and address the socio-cultural problem of being unable to reach some groups of men—in particular, those most at risk of developing the disease. As part of the consultancy, Koller and Ereaut used a series of linguistic tools to identify the charity’s existing brand identity, which was deemed to be gendered and classed in a way that was not in accordance with the company’s target audiences. Their linguistic analysis of lexis, transitivity and visuals uncovered a specific type of masculinity conveyed that was British, white, middle-class and educated; instead, the organisation was trying to reach working-class men, men outside the South East of England and African/Afro-Caribbean men—the latter group being statistically more at risk of developing this form of cancer. Koller and Ereaut then assisted in the creation of a new brand identity via a process of ‘linguistic adaptation’—the rebranding was designed to enable the charity to appeal to a much wider population and thus increase its fundraising capabilities and the reach of its diagnostic health messages.

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In order to check the significance of their consultancy recommendations, they followed up with what they term a ‘language audit’ several months later. They conclude by discussing how their experiences can be more widely applied to collaborations between linguistics and third-sector organisations, including those where income generation has become key to the survival of charities in what has become a very competitive marketplace. Finally, the ‘Businesses’ section concludes with another practitioner’s voice in Chap. 6, through Mooneeram’s consultancy work with Accenture, a large multinational employer. The focus of Mooneeram’s chapter is on her professional communication consultancy work in one of Accenture’s global bases, its Indian Ocean location of Mauritius. Mooneeram documents her own experiences as a practitioner, delivering leadership consultancy in this culturally dynamic base. Her detailed reflective piece illustrates the unique position that she occupies professionally, as she has moved from being a linguist in an international academic context to becoming a freelance researcher and communications consultant in the country of her birth. As opposed to being based on a particular investigation through empirical research, her consultancy offering is linguistically informed and delivered through a series of workshops and training sessions where she discusses multiple, effective ways in which the tools of linguistics can be taught to business professionals and leaders so that they have everyday practical value within a large multinational organisation.

3.2

Healthcare

Moving on to second section of the volume, ‘Healthcare’ is defined as contexts where interactions, whether they are spoken, written or digital, involve a healthcare professional engaging in workplace communication with patients, family members, patients’ representatives and members of the public, alongside empirical investigations of interprofessional communication that takes place between healthcare professionals, with colleagues at various status levels. It also incorporates patients communicating about their conditions as part of research data capture in monologic,

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narrative-based forms, where there is no direct interaction with a healthcare professional, but where these data are analysed and then used as training resources, where candid reflection is often given by patients on communication that has taken place with healthcare professionals. In Chap. 7, Stubbe et al. focus on three case studies of health communication in relation to diabetes in the New Zealand healthcare system, in response to the socio-cultural problem of a rapid rise in diabetes diagnoses in New Zealand and globally. Stubbe’s research group is an excellent example of an interdisciplinary team which has produced a multitude of different research projects based on genuine dialogue between researchers and practitioners. To facilitate this dialogic process, despite being a sociolinguist, Stubbe is located within the Medical School at Otago University alongside clinicians, which has given her a unique insight into the everyday workings of health communication in its natural settings. Stubbe et al. ensure that a two-way dialogue exists with practitioners, where possible, in all of their projects. They characterise their work as researching ‘for and with’ health professionals and service users. This includes consultancy research funded from a variety of different sources. They align themselves with the principles of what they term ‘participatory action’ research and ‘appreciative inquiry’, encouraging practitioners to adopt iterative processes of observation and reflection. They integrate a series of engagement strategies that go far beyond simplistic dissemination of findings and instead engage in activities where they blend participatory action research with consultancy and advocacy. Their first case study focuses on troubleshooting interprofessional communication amongst healthcare teams who are providing diabetes care, based on the work of Dowell et al. (2018). This project investigates how teams in primary care support newly diagnosed patients through the initial stages of managing their condition. The aim of this is to identify key points at which effective communication, miscommunication or inefficiencies in communication are most likely to occur, to improve compliance and treatment outcomes. The second case study focuses on narratives of people living with diabetes, giving voice to patient experiences, with the overall aim of producing a multimedia, open access educational resource based on the patients’ stories of lived experiences of the condition, for use as a training resource for healthcare professionals; this

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resource has been designed for trainees and for those already established in clinical posts. Finally, the third case study focuses on a research angle that became emergent during case study 1, that some patients were unaware that they were overweight and thus more at risk of developing diabetes. It focuses on the development of an innovative communicative tool for primary care providers to engage patients in conversations about healthy weight, breaking current socio-cultural problems around conversations on ‘taboo’ topics, facilitating the way for patients to be more fully informed of their own health and lifestyle choices. Given the global epidemic of diabetes and the growing demands for treatment in primary care, the findings of Stubbe et  al.’s work have broad applicability in healthcare domains across multiple countries where diabetes has emerged as a significant health issue for primary care providers and their patients. Additionally, Stubbe et  al. point out the inability to have appropriate conversations about obesity, being overweight and lifestyle choices in primary care is an internationally-recognised problem, which can be addressed through the development of innovative interventions such as their lifestyle tool. Moving from New Zealand to the US, in Chap. 8, Boyd et al. present a set of healthcare case studies, this time investigating emergent ‘telehealth’ practices. ‘Telehealth’ practices are defined as technology driven, non-face-to-face interactions, involving either live audio-visual conferencing, remote monitoring of patients in the home via a technological device or an e-health interface via mobile phone, tablet or another form of technology. They argue that all work on telehealth actively incorporates advocacy for the mode of delivery, as well as some form of activism by researchers on behalf of patients/clients and their particular health condition. Their focus is on improving the well-being of ageing populations, particularly ‘lower-income’ older adults located in the Southeastern US. They investigate the potential value of using telehealth practices as effective communication tools to increase physical activity to reduce falls and cardio-vascular disease in their research population. They investigate whether telehealth interventions can make positive differences to the health and well-being of older residents, and what their roles as advocates or activists should be, as such interventions enable residents to stay in semi-independent accommodation complexes for longer—all

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participants were no longer living in their primary homes due to care costs they could no longer afford. In Chap. 9, Watson’s work on interprofessional health communication draws on her extensive research experience in healthcare contexts from Australia, Hong Kong and the US, and she positions her work as having clear global applicability. She focuses on how the socio-cultural problem of poor interprofessional communication can lead to miscommunication and patient errors compromising safety, sometimes resulting in patient death. She convincingly argues that current interprofessional medical communication training is inadequate as it focuses solely upon generic communicative competence, without any theoretical justification, thus ignoring crucial factors in health settings, including intergroup dynamics and socio-technical structures. As with Handford and Darics, Watson focuses on the concept of ICC, this time through the lens of healthcare professionals having different cultures and using different medical registers, which can lead to serious communication failures. Watson argues that, instead of a model built on ICC, communication accommodation theory (CAT) works better to reduce the significance of intergroup differences, which can instead promote effective health communication. She reports on the results of an on-going study investigating the effectiveness of CAT with Australian pharmacy trainees, to develop a reflective educational tool where they learn the workings of interactional dynamics and how this affects other healthcare professionals and patients. Like Darics, she argues for more interdisciplinary research to take place, this time in order to address the global problem of miscommunication in interprofessional health contexts and the role it plays in patient error. The next contribution in healthcare is taken from a UK context, though it also has a much broader, global applicability. Demjén and Semino focus on a research consultancy that they carried out investigating the role of metaphors in the context of cancer and end of life care. They reflect upon their experiences of communicating the results of their metaphor study to a range of different stakeholders, including patients, healthcare professionals and the media. They provide a thorough and frank discussion of the various challenges they encountered, how they overcome at least some of these and the benefits to patients and their families of trying to ensure that research consultancy findings are not

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misrepresented in favour of mass media soundbites. They document the wide variety of consultancy activities in which they have engaged as part of this research. They provide a number of candid illustrations of how their research findings were both well-represented and misrepresented, along with the innovative strategies they developed to counter such problems of inaccurate research dissemination. They also document the creation of a practical metaphor tool designed to support cancer patients, as part of their consultancy work, thus providing a prime example of feeding back directly to the researched with a tool of practical relevance. The final healthcare chapter is a practitioner reflection from Mann on interprofessional communication in primary healthcare in the UK, from an ethnographic, communities of practice perspective. Mann’s work draws on recent changes to the primary healthcare system and on how professional role responsibilities and their accompanying discourses shift in ever-evolving healthcare contexts. She reports on an empirical consultancy investigation into the changing roles of clinical pharmacists, who are now required to be based in General Practitioners’ (GPs) surgeries and give formal consultations to free up GPs’ time for non-urgent cases in England and Wales. The linguistic complexities of working in interprofessional healthcare teams again come to the fore as a form of changing workplace healthcare practices.

3.3

Institutions

As briefly articulated at the beginning of Sect. 3, ‘Institutions’ are focused on through the domains of politics, education and law. They most often relate to policy-driven professional communication research, and include proposing changes to the policies and practices of organisations. The political focus begins with Hardaker’s research in Chap. 12, where she focuses on a grassroots political campaign, spearheaded by the journalist and political campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez. Hardaker reports on how Criado-Perez successfully ran a political campaign to get a woman represented on British banknotes. The focus of Hardaker’s work was after the success of the campaign. She examined Twitter users’ comments towards Criado-Perez once it was announced that that author Jane Austen

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would appear on a ten-pound banknote. Alongside its political focus, this chapter also brings in elements of the law, as Hardaker details how the threatening behaviour and the linguistic violence of some Twitter users was found to be illegal and individuals were sentenced to time in prison as a consequence of the language used in their abusive tweets, including rape and death threats. Hardaker demonstrates how her corpus linguistic analysis bought to the fore serious patterns of abuse and incitement to violence towards a professional woman expressing political views on Twitter. Hardaker then goes on to detail the inspiring way in which her research turned into advocacy and activist work, as she was invited by Twitter to a roundtable event, with a variety of stakeholders, including Criado-Perez, to discuss the consequences of the findings. A few months later, Twitter changed its policy regarding incitement to others to cause violence, as a direct consequence of the corpus linguistic study and the roundtable event, thus presenting an exemplar of best practice in terms of bringing about successful socio-cultural change in a large scale, global organisation through advocacy and activism based on original linguistic research evidence. In Chap. 13, Mullany and Trickett investigate language and law in a commissioned research consultancy to assess the effects of the introduction of the policing policy, ‘Misogyny Hate Crime’. They critically examine how their roles as researchers transitioned from consultants to advocates and activists at various stages of the research process. They examine the language politics surrounding the policy’s introduction, following the decision of Nottinghamshire Police to become the first police force in the world to bring in this category of hate crime, as a way to address the significant socio-cultural problem of street harassment of women and girls, alongside gender-based violence in a variety of public locations, including workplaces. They examine police officers’ evaluations of the language of the policy, along with their assessment of the effects of the policy’s name on the practical implementation of the change, as part of their daily professional lives; thirdly, they focus on victims’ evaluations and assessments of the interactions that took place when they reported misogyny hate crime throughout the different stages of the reporting process with a range of law enforcement professionals. This includes victims’ reflections on initial interactions when reporting via telephone or online,

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face-to-face interactions with police officers and interactions with legal professionals including the Crown Prosecution Service, the body which assesses evidence for a case to go to court in England and Wales. Mullany and Trickett take an interdisciplinary approach, with sociolinguistic professional communication research combined with expertise from law, and crime and criminology studies—as well as being an academic, Trickett is also a qualified lawyer. Whilst their data are taken from a UK context, the findings have international reach in terms of the critical language choices that are made when bringing in policing policy changes, as well as changes to the law statute for legal policies on hate crime. Their shifting roles and identities between being consultants, advocates and activists are also addressed in specific relation to an ongoing Law Commission Review of Hate Crime in which they have been directly consulted. In Chap. 14, Sauntson focuses on the pressing political issue of LGBT education in the school curricula in England and Wales in an investigation of homophobic and exclusionary discourses. These discourses emerge through a combined corpus linguistic and CDA analysis of government documents, designed to guide teaching practices in the discipline of Relationships and Sexual Education (RSE). Through her combined corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis of government-produced documents designed to provide direction and guidance for teachers in state secondary schools in England and Wales (pupils aged 11–18), Saunston demonstrates continued marginalisation of LGBT identities, families and relationships within the schooling system. This is a very topical study, with a significant amount of debate currently circulating in the UK and many other countries about what educators should be teaching in classrooms regarding LGBT relationships, identities and discourses, as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century. The analysis enables a systematic investigation of how the relationships and sexual education documents use language to perpetuate discriminatory discourses around non-heterosexual identities and relationships. Her work illustrates how her robust linguistic findings can be used as an evidence base through which to put pressure on policy makers and other government groups who claim to be reducing inequality and enhancing diversity in school curricula. She makes a clear argument that curriculum

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developers and policy-makers should completely remove discriminatory language in order to provide secondary school teachers with the advice that they need to make their classrooms more inclusive and less exclusionary. In Chap. 15, File and Schnurr investigate interprofessional communication in a consultancy of a netball sports team experiencing points of conflict through a broad educational lens, alongside a focus on reflections on the politics of leadership in sport. They take an interactional sociolinguistic approach and adopt the innovative approach of focusing on their own interactions as consultants when giving feedback and practical recommendations to the researched. They examine their own articulation of points of linguistic tension between the team captain and coach and how they troubleshoot these moments with the speakers themselves through consultancy feedback using the linguistic data transcripts. They thus take an innovative approach by becoming the topic of their own analysis, examining their consultancy interactions with the researched. This provides fascinating insight into the consultancy process and periods of negotiation between consultant and the researched. They demonstrate how linguistic consultancy can also include attempts to solve particular communication problems through interactional sociolinguistics and reflexive considerations of discussion of consultancy research transcripts. They conclude with a compelling argument that linguistic consultancy is a social activity concerned with building greater conscious awareness of the interactional skills speakers already possess, through reflection and awareness-raising as part of the feeding back stage of a linguistic consultancy. In the final chapter prior to the Epilogue, the voice of the collection goes back to the domain of law enforcement and to a practitioner, Susannah Fish QPM, OBE, who has worked at the cutting edge of police force leadership for several years. Following retirement from policing in 2017, where she had attained the office of Chief Constable, she has established a new career as a consultant and executive coach, as CEO of Starfish Consulting, based in the UK. In Chap. 16, she draws directly upon her extensive experience of policing and the highest levels of leadership. She demonstrates the value of combining narratives of personal experience with reflective practice on professional communication to outline her

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own approach to successful leadership in times of organisational change. She focuses on the pivotal role that effective communication plays in achieving workplace success. She draws upon a number of approaches to track a shift in policing discourses and leadership styles, from the autonomous ‘hero’ leader to the more ‘facilitative’ leader. She brings her perspective to life by detailing two case studies from her personal leadership experiences of how she brought about social and cultural change in difficult circumstances, under intense public scrutiny. The first case study focuses on the successful creation of a serious and organised crime unit to combat firearms criminality. The second focuses on ‘stop and search’ policies, in particular, how these had been viewed as discriminatory and racist by members of BAME communities. Both case studies focus on significant socio-cultural problems that the police force needed to solve urgently in order to restore public confidence and trust, where effective communication with multiple stakeholders was key. Finally, Janet Holmes closes the collection, bringing together key contributions, followed by projections of where professional communication research will go in future. She assesses the themes that have been explored in the volume through consultancy, advocacy and activism and predicts that a number of areas will grow in importance. This includes further development of intercultural communication and multilingualism, incorporating a focus on those at the margins of professional workplaces. She draws attention to the need to study code-switching, translanguaging and hidden racism in future, as part of a broader questioning of taken-­ for-­granted workplace norms of majority groups, particularly when considering migrant workers and refugees entering professional spaces. Furthermore, methodologically speaking, she predicts a continued expansion of digital communication across all three areas of businesses, healthcare and institutions, along with a growth in multimodal analysis. She argues that sociolinguistic identity work will continue to remain important, and predicts that a focus on corporate professions will diminish in favour of more emergent workplaces, a transition which can already be seen in this collection. There is clearly much work still to be done. However, it is the intention that this volume provides a valuable and original addition to the growing field of professional communication. It aims to inspire researchers, practitioners, scholars, professionals and

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students and influence future studies using the approaches of consultancy, advocacy and activism in many years to come.

References Bargiela, F., Nickerson, C., & Planken, B. (2007). Business Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cameron, D., Frazer, E., Harvey, P., Rampton, B., & Richardson, K. (1992). Researching Language: Issues of Power and Method. London: Routledge. Cameron, D., Frazer, E., Harvey, P., Rampton, B., & Richardson, K. (1993). Ethics, Advocacy and Empowerment: Issues of Methods in Researching Language. Language and Communication, 13(2), 81–94. Candlin, S. (2003). Issues Arising When the Professional Workplace Is the Site of Applied Linguistic Research. Applied Linguistics, 24(3), 386–394. Candlin, C.  N., & Sarangi, S. (2004). Making Inter-relationality Matter in Applied Linguistics. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(3), 225–228. Cook, G. (2012). British Applied Linguistics: Impacts of and Impacts On. Applied Linguistics Review, 3(1), 25–45. Darics, E. (forthcoming, 2021). Language Awareness in Business and the Professions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Costa, P. (2016). Ethics in Applied Linguistics Research: An Introduction. In P. De Costa (Ed.), Ethics in Applied Linguistics Research: Language Researcher Narratives (pp. 218–236). New York: Routledge. Dowell, A., Stubbe, M., Macdonald, L., Tester, R., Gray, L., Vernall, S., Kenealy, T., Sheridan, N., Docherty, B., Hall, D.-A., Raphael, D.  L., & Dew, K. (2018). A Longitudinal Study of Interactions Between Health Professionals and People with Newly Diagnosed Diabetes. Annals of Family Medicine, 16(1), 37–44. Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and Power. London: Longman. Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Longman. Fairclough, N., & Wodak, R. (1997). Critical Discourse Analysis. In T. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction: Vol. 2. Discourse As Social Interaction (pp. 258–284). London: Sage. Gunnarsson, B.-L., Linell, P., & Nordberg, B. (1997). Introduction. In B.-L.  Gunnarsson, P.  Linell, & B.  Nordberg (Eds.), The Construction of Professional Discourse. London: Routledge.

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Labov, W. (1982). Objectivity and Commitment in Linguistic Science: The Case of the Black English Trial in Ann Arbor. Language in Society, 11(2), 165–201. Lawson, R., & Sayers, D. (Eds.). (2016). Sociolinguistic Research: Application and Impact. Oxon: Routledge. McEnery, T. (2018). Reflections on Impact. In D. McIntyre & H. Price (Eds.), Applying Linguistics: Language and the Impact Agenda (pp.  29–40). Oxon: Routledge. McIntyre, D., & Price, H. (Eds.). (2018) Language and the Impact Agenda. London: Routledge. Morrish, L., & Saunston, H. (2019). Academic Irregularities: Language and Neoliberalism in Higher Education. Oxon: Routledge. Mullany, L. (2008). Negotiating Methodologies: Making Language and Gender Relevant in the Professional Workplace. In K.  Harrington, L.  Litosseliti, H.  Sauntson, & J.  Sunderland (Eds.), Gender and Language Research Methodologies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mullany, L. (forthcoming, 2021). Sociolinguistic Awareness in Business Professionals. Breaking Stereotypes and Language Myths. In E. Darics (Ed.), Language Awareness in Business and the Professions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Price, H. (2018). Navigating the Peripheries of Impact: Public Engagement and the Problem of Kneejerk Linguistics. In D.  McIntyre & H.  Price (Eds.), Applying Linguistics: Language and the Impact Agenda (pp.  41–52). Oxon: Routledge. Roberts, C., & Sarangi, S. (2003). Uptake of Discourse Research in Interprofessional Settings: Reporting from Medical Consultancy. Applied Linguistics, 24(3), 338–359. Sarangi, S., & Roberts, C. (Eds.). (1999). Talk, Work and Institutional Order: Discourse in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. Silberstein, S. (2016). Ethics in Activist Scholarship: Media/Policy Analyses of Seattle’s Homeless Encampment Sweeps. In P.  De Costa (Ed.), Ethics in Applied Linguistics Research: Language Researcher Narratives (pp.  218–236). New York: Routledge. Wolfram, W. (1993). Ethical Considerations in Language Awareness Programs. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 4, 225–255.

Part I Businesses and Organisations

2 Training ‘International Engineers’ in Japan: discourse, Discourse and Stereotypes Michael Handford

1

Introduction

Much intercultural business communication training is based on essentialist notions of national culture, that encourage the noticing, explanation and even prediction of behaviour of perceived ‘others’ based on nationality (Piller 2011; Scollon et al. 2012). The same can be said for much commercial training and educational material. Sarangi and Roberts (1999: 29) decry the general thrust of workplace training materials as ‘absurdly simple’ in their portrayal of communication, and Handford (2010: 249) argues that ‘unquestioned national or even continental stereotypes’ abound in many business communication textbooks and intercultural business training materials. Scollon et al. (2012: 282) state that for ‘most people who seek training expect recipes for dealing with essentialised binary groupings’—in other words, how one nationality is

M. Handford (*) School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 L. Mullany (ed.), Professional Communication, Communicating in Professions and Organizations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41668-3_2

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different from another. Many argue that these training programmes and materials may worsen rather than enable successful communication (Sarangi 1994; Handford 2010; Piller 2011; Scollon et  al. 2012; Handford et  al. 2019), through the reinforcement of stereotypes, thus damaging business relationships. This raises several questions, including why are such approaches so popular? How might these stereotypes manifest themselves in business? And, is there an alternative approach to intercultural business training? This chapter will deal mainly with the second and third questions, discussing an approach developed with an engineering multinational company based in Japan which encourages trainees to question their own stereotypes and to see identity as dynamic rather than fixed. In other words, stereotyping was interpreted as the key social practice that was targeted during the consultancy work. While the training happens to occur in a multinational in Japan, the issues it deals with are argued to be present in many workplaces and contexts around the world. Furthermore, the main group we trained, especially in the early years of the training, were professional engineers. While engineering has traditionally been seen as prioritising ‘hard’ scientific and technical knowledge, the demands of the complex world in which we live have seen a shift in expectations, if not practices. A study conducted by several leading engineering schools in Brazil, China, Germany, Japan, Switzerland and the USA concluded: Despite their diverse histories, cultures, economies, and engineering infrastructures, it is apparent that all six countries recognize the need for a dramatically different kind of engineer and, remarkably, they agree substantially on their desired traits. The highly-analytical, technically-focused engineering “nerd” is a person of the past. They seek engineers who are technically adept, culturally aware, and broadly knowledgeable … What they seek is a global engineer. (Global Engineering Excellence Initiative 2006: 32)

In other words, professional engineers are seen as needing a wider range of skills than the ‘merely’ technical in order to achieve the impact that their knowledge promises, and to be effective members of teams. The training examined here is partly in recognition of this changing context.

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The first question, concerning why such approaches are so popular, is largely beyond the scope of this chapter, but a short cartographical analogy might offer some illumination (see also Handford et  al. 2019). Imagine there are two maps, one of which is simple, clear and recognisable, the other of which is confusing and seems to repeatedly make you return to your original position. Which one would you choose? What if the first one was wrong? While you might expect people to choose the second one, research on mental processes (Kahlemann 2011), like our confirmation bias, suggests many of us would still choose the first one. The argument here is that this is the case with culture, stereotypes and intercultural communication: even though we may know that they are inaccurate, we still rely on them to guide us, they make us feel safe, and they can even prevent us from noticing behaviours that contradict the stereotype (Fiske 2002; Handford et  al. 2019). The only way to break these down is through education, economic opportunities and positive interactions between the in-group, to which the person with the stereotype identifies, and the out-group, in this situation the stereotyped group, or individual who is seen as belonging to this group (Fiske 2002). As such, intercultural business training can provide one of the few educational opportunities for such stereotypes to be problematised, and for alternative ways of interpreting and behaving in the world to be explored. In the next section, a brief explanation of the two approaches to culture is given, followed by a brief discussion of stereotypes. It is followed by a description of the training context and the stakeholders involved, the needs/data analysis, a brief outline of the training content, a discussion of the way the training was evaluated and finally a reflection on the training that examines several of the core themes of this volume.

2

 heoretical Background: Culture T and Stereotypes

Culture has been defined in two widely different, arguably mutually exclusive, ways (Piller 2011; Holliday et  al. 2017). Handford et  al. (2019), discussing the role of culture in an engineering context, label

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these two approaches ‘culture-as-given’ and ‘culture-as-construct’. The former approach assumes that cultures are predefined groups, often a nationality, and can allow for the prediction of behaviour of members of the cultures in intercultural interaction. It draws on essentialism, ‘the view that categories have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly but that gives an object its identity’ (Gelman 2003: 3), and it sees culture as something inherent, something that people belong to or have, usually by virtue of their birth. Furthermore, there is a strong focus on cultural difference, again usually at the level of perceived national practices, values and beliefs. The work of Hofstede (e.g., 2001) has been very influential in offering academic support for this approach (see McSweeney 2002 for a rigorous critique of Hofstede’s methods and findings). The latter approach, rather than seeing culture as a noun, sees it as a verb (Street 1993), akin to a ‘liquid’ that cannot be reduced to a single, overriding homogeneous identity (Bauman 2007). ‘Cultures’, Holliday et  al. (2017: 3) argue, ‘can flow, change, intermingle, cut across and through each other, regardless of national frontiers, and have blurred boundaries’. Therefore, trying to define the cultural dimensions of one or other pre-arranged group makes little sense at best. Indeed, the argument here and elsewhere (Sarangi 1994; Piller 2011; Holliday et  al. 2017; Handford et  al. 2019) is that, rather than just being misleading, the culture-­as-given approach can hinder rather than enhance intercultural communication. This is despite the prevalence of the approach in mainstream society and much of academia, particularly behavioural sciences, organisational studies, management studies, psychology (Baskerville 2003) and engineering (Handford et al. 2019). As mentioned above, the culture-as-given approach is essentialist, and this tends to find form in terms of essentialised conceptions of national identities (Piller 2011). Essentialism and stereotyping thus have an intimate relationship: [S]tereotyping borrows the language and conceptual framework of essentializing. Different groups of people are treated as distinct in deep, non-­ obvious ways, and social group differences are assumed to be innately determined and fixed. To the extent that people buy into this way of

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t­ hinking, they will have a basis for treating social group differences as central to an individual’s identity, for drawing inferences about an individual based on the group to which the individual belongs, and for attributing different motivations and explanations to those from different social groups. (Gelman 2003: 13–14)

This dovetails with Hinton’s (2002) explanation of stereotypes: firstly we label a group of people (e.g., British, or engineers). Next, we attribute a set of additional characteristics to the whole of this group, such as ‘the British are irrational’, and finally we assume that a person we identify as a member of this group will have these additional characteristics we attributed to the group. As discussed below, stereotypes can concern groups people consider themselves members of, as well as groups people see as ‘other’. An extensive, robust, pervasive version of the culture-as-given approach, relevant to the training discussed here, is Nihonjinron. Nihonjinron literally means ‘theories of the Japanese people’; it has been expressed in countless mainstream and academic publications, and is Japan’s ‘dominant identity discourse’ (Befu 2001: ix); indeed, it has arguably been so dominant that no other worldview in Japan, for example multiculturalism, can compete and must define itself in relation to Nihonjinron. Its singular aim, according to Befu (2001: 4) is to ‘demonstrate the unique qualities of Japanese culture, Japanese society, and the Japanese people’. While many national cultures may have views on their own uniqueness, Sugimoto (2015) argues that this concerted, policy-­ supported attempt to show the ‘uniquely unique’ nature of Japan is indeed unique. Nihonjinron is based on four assumptions, or stereotypes: all Japanese citizens share a set of characteristics, such as a collectivist orientation, regardless of age, gender and so on; there is virtually no variation in terms of how much individuals possess the characteristic; the characteristic exists only marginally, if at all, in other societies, especially Western societies; and fourthly the trait has existed in Japanese society independent of historical circumstances (Sugimoto 2015: 4). The training was designed and conducted by Prof Hiro Tanaka, a highly experienced communication consultant and researcher of organisational discourse, who had been working with the company for some

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years on other training programmes, and me. Drawing on the needs analysis for the training discussed here, Professor Tanaka and I interpreted many of the responses of the trainees and their managers, such as the professed inability of Japanese people to communicate effectively in another language, or stereotyping of perceived self/in-group or other/ out-group (see below), as reflecting or constituting Nihonjinron discourses; furthermore, we argued that this was potentially detrimental to the aims of the training, and that an alternative perspective on identity and communication in international business contexts was proposed and practised (see Tanaka and Handford 2008). This approach, outlined in more detail below, draws partly on the work of Scollon et al. (2012: 281), who argue that, for successful intercultural communication (ICC) to occur, participants need to be encouraged to consider the situations in which they find themselves; specifically, they need to explore ‘how different discourse systems—not just discourse systems associated with “national cultures” but also discourse systems like professional and corporate discourse systems and gender discourse systems—might become relevant in these situations and impact communication’. Indeed, they argue that framing ICC as ‘interdiscourse communication’ is beneficial both academically and practically.

3

The Training

3.1

Initial Focus

The training programme discussed here started in 2007  in a multinational Japanese engineering company, hereafter referred to by the pseudonym JE (Japan Engineering), whose main international business was engineering, procurement and the construction business, for instance designing and building power stations and factories. The stakeholders directly involved included the upper management of the international division of the company, and the groups of company trainees who were mainly engineers. Indirectly affected stakeholders were the various groups involved in large international construction projects, such as potential

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and existing clients, sub-contracted companies, and government employees (see Emmett and Gorse 2003), who would collaborate with JE staff. The upper management of the company initially hired us for two years, with instructions to work with the international division, a broad, interdepartmental group responsible for all aspects of international projects, although most of our trainees in the earlier years were engineers. We were paid directly as independent consultants, although our status as academics working on organisational discourse was a key factor in our being hired. The upper management were aiming to improve international sales over the medium to long term because the domestic market was very mature (MLIT 2010), and they were concerned about the ability of the engineers to communicate in a sales-oriented way. We were therefore tasked with training junior and mid-level engineers within the company who would be responsible for selling the company’s products to European and American mega-pharma clients based in Singapore. The primary evaluation metrics would be feedback from trainees and revenue (see below). The training is still ongoing, more than a decade since it began, although since my return to the UK in 2016 I have not been involved. While the initial focus of the project was this cohort, after a few years it widened to include other employees who were involved in international sales. This was partly in response to the positive evaluation of the revenue increase (see below), and partly because of a response to the thrust of our training: by enabling trainees from different sections and departments to work together in a non-confrontational, collaborative way, it would be possible to improve interdepartmental (in other words, intercultural) understanding and cooperation. In summary, while the initial focus of our training was on engineers, it did expand later on, although the focus of the training, in response to similar needs, remained largely consistent throughout.

3.2

Data Collection

In order to increase the validity of needs-analysis research, Long (2005) argues that it should employ multiple methodologies rather than relying solely upon interviews and questionnaires. In order to capture

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multi-dimensional data, the iterative needs analysis used here captured multiple data sources, including documents, unstructured interviews with experienced engineers, human resource (HR) staff, managers, on-­ site observations of workplace interactions, observation of trainees, and regular discussions with the trainees over their perceived issues, difficulties and areas of expertise. The data were validated through peer debriefing, that is, having impartial parties check our data and its interpretation, thus raising the chances of achieving validity (Davis 1992). When collecting data, we paid special attention to ‘critical incidents’ (Spencer-­ Oatey and Franklin 2009) relating to the learners’ discourse competence needs. Through analysis of these data, two key areas emerged: the linguistic/ pragmatic aspect (see below), and a strong culture of stereotyping based on nationality at many levels of the company. These stereotypes were usually negative, and many reflected positively on the perceived in-group (Japanese) and negatively on the out-group. For instance, one employee told about working with Singaporeans, who, unlike the Japanese, didn’t write key information on the whiteboard in the meeting room. He then said this was because Singaporeans are lazy. This provided interesting material for examining with the trainees in terms of how the process of stereotyping unfolds, and I could counter that the behaviour may be because of linguistic ability: they didn’t feel the need to write things down to be understood. But importantly, it was one of many instances of communication between people of different nationalities, where at least one person made the difference of nationality salient, then a perceived difference of behaviour was attributed to the nationality, which was then evaluated negatively. As such it follows Hinton’s (2002) description of the stereotyping process outlined above, and is a single example of many such negative evaluations we encountered. It should also be noted that some stereotypes negatively evaluated the avowed in-group (Japanese) and positively evaluated certain out-groups (usually ‘native speakers’ of English). Many of the concerns expressed by trainees during the needs analysis stages of the sessions were linguistic in nature, for example ‘to learn effective conjunction words when I’m asked unexpected questions’, ‘how to use back channels in conversation’; others were more pragmalinguistic, for instance ‘explain my opinion clearly’, or ‘to share objectives,

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background and current status of projects’. There were, however, many that were more related to socio-cultural issues, for instance: • ‘To learn how to prepare myself and the strategy when I talk to people from different culture (position, country)’ • ‘Understanding how we should act when attending the meeting with different backgrounds’ • ‘To acquire the skills of smooth communication with people of different culture’ • ‘Learn what you have to do to watch out for (avoid things you shouldn’t do)’ • ‘How to facilitate meeting and humour for English business communication’ • ‘I want to know the proper attitude in English meeting’ • ‘To learn key points to understand native speakers’ attitude and mind in meeting’ As can be seen, while many of these needs do not invoke explicit stereotypes, they do embody a ‘differentialist’ perspective reflecting a culture-­as-given understanding. Other needs’ analysis comments more explicitly reflected stereotypes. When interpreting the stereotypes, Bar-­ Tal’s (1997) distinction between autostereotypes (about the speaker’s perceived in-group), and heterostereotypes (which relate to an ‘out-group’) is indicative. Table 2.1 shows several of these types: Table 2.1  Trainee autostereotypes and heterostereotypes Autostereotypes

Heterostereotypes

Japanese are more polite than others Japanese work harder than anyone else

(Singaporeans) are lazy (Singaporeans) are good communicators Native speakers of English are very direct English (‘native speaker’) humour is not funny Native speakers of English talk too much Native speakers of English are very aggressive

Japanese lose business opportunities because they are not forthright enough Japanese are quiet and shy Japanese are not good at English/ international communication Japanese are indirect when communicating

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It is possible to cite research that problematises many if not all of these assumptions, for instance Sunaoshi’s (2005) work on the convergent use of humour in US-Japanese factory communication, or Befu (2001) on verboseness in certain contexts in Japan, or extensive work that critiques the notion of the ‘native speaker’ and rejects her/him as a model of good communication in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) contexts (Seidlhofer 2011), but that is not the primary purpose of the present study. Instead, it is to show the types of stereotypes that were prevalent in this context, and how the training was developed to address them. It should also be mentioned that not all the stereotypes were at the national level: for instance engineers and sales staff sometimes negatively stereotyped each other, and there were also age-related and gender-related stereotypes. However, it was found that, in diverse groups, the degree of such stereotyping reduced. This insight is an important one, and provides evidence relevant to the diversity agenda of many multinationals (Mor Barak and Travis 2009).

3.3

Training Sessions

The training usually took part over two full days, with cohorts of around 10–15 employees, although some programmes were longer. Following the needs analysis, the focus of the first day was on the linguistic and pragmatic issues discussed above, with the second day exploring the socio-cultural perspective, with a strong focus on raising awareness of stereotypes followed by an alternative perspective. These are the main topics for the second day: • Discourse and discourse • International Team Building • Culture and Business: Multicultural Alliances The key aims for the session were as follows: • Decouple notions of nationality and culture • Discourage essentialist expectations/post-hoc explanations

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• Avoiding stereotyping and ethnocentrism • Encourage more positive attitudes to managing diverse teams For the d/Discourse distinction, we examined Gee’s (2005: 21) definitions, with discourse as stretches of oral or written language, and Discourse as ‘distinctive ways of acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, dressing, thinking, believing, with other people and with various objects, tools, and technologies, so as to enact specific socially recognizable identities, engaged in specifically socially recognised activities’. After offering a few examples, trainees were encouraged to come up with examples of their own. These included members of Japanese biker gangs (‘bosozoku’), company ‘salarymen’, ethnic Korean permanent residents in Japan (‘zainichi kankokujin’) and Shibuya high school girls known as ‘yamamba’. Through a discussion of the ways of talking, dressing and performing these identities, the trainees were encouraged to reflect on the diversity within Japanese society, and also on the notion of Japan being a homogenous culture; in other words, this problematised some of the assumptions of Nihonjinron. As the primary goal of the training was to bring about change in the organisational discourse/Discourse in JE, trainees were next encouraged to explore what they understood by ‘JE Discourse’, discussing practices around appropriate dress, timekeeping, communication between genders, disagreeing with superiors, and supporting each other in international communication. Next, trainees were asked to outline what they saw as an ideal JE international Discourse—in other words what practices would allow for the development of successful relationships in international contexts, the successful negotiation of intercultural problems, the development and management of successful, diverse teams, and improved international sales. While imagining such a change was reasonably straightforward, trainees (who were relatively young in the company) sometimes commented on the practical difficulties of making such changes. For instance, when discussing ‘supporting each other in international communication’, the issue of seniority and language ability was raised. Often, the more senior JE manager in international meetings was expected to lead the discussion because of their seniority, but usually the younger employees were more fluent in English than their older

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colleagues. While the trainees accepted that supporting colleagues through back-channelling, co-construction and repair was ideal, in reality their ‘superiors’ (‘senpai’) could become affronted in such contexts. Clearly there is no simple solution to this, and we fed this back to the senior managers. The agreement was that we would encourage the trainees to play a ‘long game’ and to follow the Golden Rule (‘treat others as you want to be treated’) once they were in positions of power, and for the managers involved in the needs analysis to discuss the aims of the training with senior colleagues and to encourage a more flexible approach. Feedback over many years of the training suggests that what could be considered positive change did indeed occur in this area (but see Sect. 3 on the ethical implications of this). Following on from the exploration of d/Discourse, we then examined stereotypes in depth, drawing a distinction between stereotypes and generalisations. For instance, trainees were asked whether the following are stereotypes (all of which were said by trainees during the training): 1 . Japanese people live longer than other nations 2. Japanese people are more polite than other nations 3. French people are dishonest in business 4. Engineers are not good at communicating 5. I can’t trust sales people Following other activities aimed at raising awareness of inbuilt stereotypes, trainees then examined a case study of a very successful international alliance. The point of this was to explore how an international alliance involving a large Japanese company and a European competitor could succeed, thus problematising many of the Nihonjinron assumptions that would be unable to explain such a success. An abridged form of the case study can be found in Handford et al. (2011). The case study examined the alliance’s principles, such as the preservation of each brand’s cultural identity, and continuous dialogues and communications to promote a spirit of partnership, along with ways of reconciling cultural differences when they did occur. The training finished with a lengthy role play that encouraged the trainees to apply several of the insights they had gained through the training to a realistic, relevant business situation, followed by a discussion of practices they wanted to see JE embrace.

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Programme Evaluation

To evaluate the impact and success of the training, Kirkpatrick’s (1994) four levels for training evaluation are operationalised. These measure the reaction of learners, the amount of learning, behavioural change and organisational impact (see Table  2.2). In Hiramatsu’s (2001) review of training in Japanese companies, more than 90% administer questionnaires following the training (Level 1), but very little data is collected on the other levels. While the lack of other data may be due to concerns over quantifiability, or optimism over the effects of training (Pucel 2001), it is possible and indeed desirable to evaluate training programmes along the four criteria. Following the training, Level 1 feedback was consistently very high, with over 90% levels of satisfaction reported in questionnaires. Levels 2 and 3 are indeed less quantifiable and less tangible, but the expansion of the programme beyond engineers, and feedback from clients to the company, provide evidence that the training addressed these levels, with some trainees at least. For instance, one external partner reported back that a mid-level manager, who had previously been ‘very non-communicative, overly vague and impersonal for many years’, showed changes in behaviour in the following ways: Table 2.2  Kirkpatrick’s four levels Level 1: reaction Level 2: learning Level 3: transfer

Level 4: value to the organisation

A measure of participants’ initial reactions to a course, usually assessed through surveys A measure of the amount of information that participants learned, usually assessed using criterion-referenced tests A measure of the amount of material learned that participants actually use in everyday work, usually assessed using observations and interviews with co-workers and supervisors A measure of the financial impact of the training course on the bottom line of the organisation, assessment for this level is not clearly defined

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• He developed the ability to say ‘no’. Even framed it in a way that made obvious to her he was doing it in a self-aware away, and that he had learnt this during the training • He became much more engaged in meetings, both physically (body language) and in terms of verbal communication • He explained things much more • He shows a much more personal side, bringing in pictures of his family. While this report may seem rather anecdotal, it is an instance of a pattern that was reported back to us by HR. Also, the fact that the training was continued beyond the initial two years, and expanded beyond the original cohort, is also suggestive of changes in learning and behaviour. However, it is Level 4 that is of most importance to a company. HR reported back that, following the first two years of training, there had been an improvement in international sales of 300%; while this also explains the company’s willingness to expand the training, it should be noted that the training may not have caused this increase; for instance, several other factors could have impacted this increase, such as technological developments, the economy at that time, the market for factory construction, and so on. Nevertheless, ‘value to the company’ is not just financial, and in terms of ‘internationalising’ the organisational discourse of JE, we are confident we enabled a positive change.

4

Reflections

This chapter has outlined an example of consultancy work, which involved the collection of a range of data, and was reciprocal in terms of a constant iterative dialogue between the trainers and the groups of stakeholders. When considering whether the training was an instance of consultancy pure and simple, or involved empowerment (Cameron et  al. 1993), it is argued here that the training offered opportunities for empowerment, but that this is not a straightforward conclusion. As Cameron et al. (1993: 89) state, ‘attempts at empowerment cannot be uncritical; it is not just a matter of giving people “more power”, but of recognising that every group in a community is itself an arena for conflict and struggle’.

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The issue of seniority and co-construction in meetings discussed above was an instance of such conflict and struggle, and assuming that training junior staff to support their senior but less linguistically adept colleagues was shown to be highly problematic. This was also an opportunity for me to reflect on my assumptions about language, power and culture, and made me realise that the relationship between seniority and language in specific contexts is not as simple as choosing appropriate linguistic forms—it also involves assumptions about who has the right to speak. Such an insight formed part of a pattern during such training. My area of expertise was very narrow, and there were several areas where the trainees were more knowledgeable and experienced than me; these include technical knowledge, knowledge of clients and partners, knowledge of working in a Japanese multinational engineering corporation, knowledge of social practices relevant to the job, and deep understanding of culturally specific expectations (e.g., within their departments). Over the course of the training I therefore learnt to ask more questions, and to use the experience of the group to answer knotty questions. I saw myself as a learner as well as the ‘expert’. This also included exhortations about how to behave, as I could not know the appropriate way for many of the trainees and the contexts they would face; instead, discussing a range of possible options and encouraging them to decide which would work best became the preferred method. Furthermore, while I am confident that raising awareness of stereotypes and encouraging more interpersonal communication in international interactions should lead to greater empowerment for the individuals and is ethically justifiable, as well as improving the bottom line for the company, this raises the issue of ‘Who knows best?’, and who has the right to impose (Byram 1997). Related to this is the question of whether such training involves ‘research on’ the stakeholders, or the more collaborative and empowering ‘research with’ (Cameron et al. 1993). On the one hand, the training might be seen as ‘research on’, from the perspective of the trainees, but ‘research with’ from the perspective of the managers and HR, when we consider the degree of input they had; but both of these changed over time. Also, we were directed to help change the organisational culture by the upper management, to help direct them towards more successful engagement in non-domestic markets, but the trainees

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were not really aware of the need for being involved in global business. This shows that the simple division of ‘research on’ versus ‘research with’ is not straightforward, and that within the same organisation both perspectives are relevant depending on the power/role of the groups themselves. Finally, it may seem odd that the training intended to problematise stereotypes, especially those of essentialist national identity, and yet the concept of Nihonjinron is operationalised to enable this. In response, Nihonjinron is not used here to stereotype any group, but is recognised as a powerful, indeed dominant discourse in Japanese society that may, if accepted uncritically, hinder successful engagement in intercultural contexts.

References Bar-Tal, D. (1997). Formation and Change of Ethnic and National Stereotypes: An Integrative Model. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 20, 341–370. Baskerville, R. (2003). Hofstede Never Studied Culture. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 28(1), 1–14. Bauman, Z. (2007). Liquid Times. Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Befu, H. (2001). Hegemony of Homogeneity. Portland: Trans Pacific Press. Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Cameron, D., Fraser, E., Harvey, P., Rampton, B., & Richardson, K. (1993). Ethics, Advocacy and Empowerment: Issues of Method in Researching Language. Language and Communication, 13(2), 81–94. Davis, K. (1992). Validity and Reliability in Qualitative Research on Second Language Acquisition and Teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 26(3), 605–608. Emmett, S., & Gorse, C. (2003). Construction Communication. Oxford: Blackwell. Fiske, S. (2002). What We Know Now About Bias and Intergroup Conflict, the Problem of the Century. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11(4), 123–128. Gee, J. P. (2005). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Gelman, S. (2003). The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Global Engineering Excellence Initiative. (2006). In Search of Global Engineering Excellence: Educating the Next Generation of Engineers for the Global Workplace, Final Report. Hanover, Germany: Continental AG.  Retrieved from www. cont-online.com. Handford, M. (2010). The Language of Business Meetings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Handford, M., Lisboa, M., Koester, A., & Pitt, A. (2011). Business Advantage: Upper Intermediate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Handford, M., van Maele, J., Matous, P., & Maemura, Y. (2019). Which Culture? A Critical Analysis of Intercultural Communication in Engineering Education. Journal of Engineering Education, 108, 161–177. Hinton, P. (2002). Stereotypes, Cognition and Culture. Hove: Psychology Press. Hiramatsu, Y. (2001). Kyoiku Kenshu Kooka no Sokutei to Hyouka no Shikata (Measurement and Evaluation of Training Effect). Tokyo: Interwork Publication. Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations across Nations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Holliday, A., Kullman, M., & Hyde, J. (2017). Intercultural Communication. An Advanced Resource Book for Students (3rd ed.). London: Routledge. Kahlemann, D. (2011). Thinking Fast and Slow. London: Penguin. Kirkpatrick, D. L. (1994). Evaluating Training Programs: The Four Levels. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Long, M. (2005). Methodological Issues in Learner Needs Analysis. In M. Long (Ed.), Second Language Needs Analysis (pp. 19–76). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McSweeney, B. (2002). The Essentials of Scholarship: A Reply to Hofstede. Human Relations, 55(11), 1363–1372. MLIT (Ministry of Land Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism). (2010). Kokusai Tenkai Kanmin Renkei Bun’ya (Report of the Division for International Expansion and Public Private Linkages). Retrieved from http:// www.mlit.go.jp/common/000115371.pdf. Mor Barak, M.  E., & Travis, D. (2009). Diversity and Organizational Performance. In Y. Hansfeld (Ed.), Human Services as Complex Organizations (2nd ed., pp. 341–378). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Piller, I. (2011). Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Pucel, D. (2001). Developing and Evaluating Performance-based Instruction. St. Paul: Performance Training Systems, Inc.. Sarangi, S. (1994). Intercultural or Not? Beyond Celebration of Cultural Differences in Miscommunication Analysis. Pragmatics, 4(3), 409–427. Sarangi, S., & Roberts, C. (1999). The Dynamics of Interactional and Institutional Orders in Work-Related Settings. In S. Sarangi & C. Roberts (Eds.), Talk, Work and the Institutional Order (pp.  2–57). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Scollon, R., Scollon, S., & Jones, R. (2012). Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Seidlhofer, B. (2011). Understanding English as a Lingua Franca. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spencer-Oatey, H., & Franklin, P. (2009). Intercultural Interaction: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Intercultural Communication. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Street, B. (1993). Culture Is a Verb: Anthropological Aspects of Language and Cultural Process. In D. Graddol, L. Thompson, & M. Byram (Eds.), Language and Culture. Clevedon: BAAL and Multilingual Matters. Sugimoto, Y. (2015). An Introduction to Japanese Society (4th ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sunaoshi, Y. (2005). Historical Context and Intercultural Communication: Interactions between Japanese and American Factory Workers in the American South. Language in Society, 34, 185–217. Tanaka, H., & Handford, M. (2008). Sanka Suru: Eigo no Meeting (Discursive Strategies in Business Meetings). Tokyo: Cosmopier.

3 The Relevance of Applied Linguistic and Discourse Research: On the Margins of Communication Consultancy Erika Darics

1

Language in Business and at Work

In the last 20 years there has been an increasing recognition of the importance of language in contemporary work: business professionals and consultants recognise the “power of words” (Czerniawska 1997; Thompson 2003), high-profile business personas speak of the crucial role of language and communication (e.g., Branson 2014) and in academia ever louder calls are issued to raise linguistic awareness in business and management education (Tietze et al. 2003; Mautner 2016; Darics 2019). In the early 2000s, organisational and management scholarship embraced a “linguistic turn” (Alvesson and Kärreman 2000): a shift that was characterised by the examination of the role of language in the constitution and reproduction of organisational processes and practices and the acknowledgement that “meanings are social constructs, produced, reproduced and transformed in particular social contexts” (Musson et al. 2007: 46). Despite this ‘turn’ in

E. Darics (*) Aston University, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 L. Mullany (ed.), Professional Communication, Communicating in Professions and Organizations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41668-3_3

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scholarship, the dialogue between linguistically focused disciplines, organisation sciences and professional practice still seems to be fragmented (Grant and Iedema 2005), and the lack of a closer interdisciplinary discussion negatively affects research and education, and consequently professional practice (for further discussion on this topic see Darics 2020). In research, as the current author and many colleagues could attest, crossing the disciplinary divide by, for instance, addressing research questions through linguistics lenses in organisational outlets can meet with high levels of resistance. Mautner (2016: 234) speculates that perhaps the lack of acknowledgement of the importance of linguistics/discourse analytic expertise is that language is often regarded as something of a “free-­ for-­ all”. Disparate conceptual and theoretical starting points that characterise the two disciplines (Hünerberg and Geile 2012) and the predominantly qualitative nature of language and discourse research often lead to questions regarding academic rigour, and, by extension, questions about usefulness and relevance of such research for professional practice (Grant et al. 2001; Dodge et al. 2005; Candlin 2003; Cooren 2006). In professional practice the collaboration between linguists and professional specialists has thus far been well-utilised in situations where linguists’ knowledge is needed to interpret texts or where instantly applicable guidelines for communication were needed—burgeoning scholarship and popular accounts show that this is particularly true in medical, legal and forensic contexts (Roberts and Sarangi 2003). In businesses and professional organisations, however, the appreciation of the crucial role of language and discourse is still lagging behind (see e.g., Baxter 2017; Darics and Clifton 2018). While many collaborations exist that are motivated by theoretical considerations and primarily scholarly interests, the relevance of research findings for practice and the impact of such work is not always straightforward. The onus is often shifted onto academic researchers to change the way they communicate about their work, because, as Alessi and Jacobs (2016: 4) note, academics are often seen “to be coding what they have studied in terminologies and meta-language of their own, painting what seems to practitioners as a distant, obtuse, alien and irrelevant interpretation”. They are therefore encouraged to identify and establish a common ground (Candlin 2003; Alessi and Jacobs 2016) and to reflect on

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how the “researchers’ perspective can help improve practitioner understanding and trigger a change in practice” (Sarangi 2002: 1). This chapter explores whether a shift in communication, greater efforts to connect academic and practitioner interests and self-reflection regarding the relevance of academic work are key for applied linguistic and linguistically informed discourse analytic research to be sought out, acknowledged and better utilised in professional practice. To do this, I discuss cases from two practitioner-commissioned projects, one that aimed to improve communication training in customer service in a global online marketplace, and one that set out to explore the communication issues that were thought to prevent a work team from achieving to their full potential. To contextualise these examples, I provide a synthesis of previous scholarship that addresses rigour and relevance in business and management research. First, I focus on the requirements and disciplinary pressures of academic rigour in the light of the priorities, interests and agenda of a commissioning organisation. Then I examine the issue of relevance for professional practice, especially when it concerns the academic integrity and the exposure of results that may be uncomfortable, or downright conflicting with the expected outcomes. I conclude the chapter by revisiting the sources of tension between academic and consultancy research and advocate the importance of the conscious acknowledgement of these so that linguistic/discourse analytical research retains its academic integrity and rigour, and can maximise its potential impact for business and the professions.

2

Rigour in Research

The aim of applied research is, apart from building theory and furthering scientific knowledge, to develop tools for practical problem-solving. Applied linguistics and discourse research concerned with business and professional communication is a prime example of these efforts, as attested by a wealth of recent publications (Breeze 2013; Mautner and Reiner 2017; McIntyre and Price 2018, this volume). Much of this work, as pointed out by Baxter (2017), is motivated by academic interests and theoretical problem-solving. Although labelled as ‘partners’, such work is

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for practitioners, where they may feature as sources of empirical data and hypothetical intended audience who may or may not find the research useful for their purposes. As Candlin and Sarangi (2004: 227) aptly observe, such partnerships may lead to “the sometimes uncomfortable possibility that our findings may be part applied and part ignored, or even misapplied”. Research with practitioners is a different type of partnership: research is commissioned and/or inspired by specific practical needs, therefore practitioner-driven, where the outcomes are defined by the practitioner’s needs, and are expected to be specific and actionable. As scholar-­ consultants, academics are commissioned to provide advice or training to clients with the main purpose of improving performance, productivity or quality (e.g., Ganapini 2016; Baxter 2017; Mullany, this volume). For both type of collaborations, however, the relationship between practical relevance and academic quality and rigour may pose serious problems— as discussed extensively in the scholarship on management research, for example, Van de Ven and Johnson (2006); Walsh et al. (2007); Kieser and Leiner (2009, 2012); Palmer et  al. (2009); Perriton and Hodgson (2013). Rigour, understood most broadly, is the accurate and systematic application of theory and method (Dodge et  al. 2005). To assess whether a research project complies with the standards and agreements of a given scientific community, and that the generated knowledge advances science in ways that is accepted within the community, only members of said community are qualified and entitled (Kieser and Leiner 2009: 522). The most obvious site where we can observe this is the review process in academic publishing, the primary site of communicating science. In research projects where practical relevance is of high importance, the formulating of research questions, identifying appropriate ways of addressing these, theoretical considerations and research methodology is motivated by different—and at times conflicting—aims. As a result of this difference, passing the standards of academic rigour is not always straightforward or effortless. This gap is further deepened by problems that arise when the question or problem to be addressed requires inter- or cross-disciplinary thinking, for example, introducing qualitative-interpretative analytical approaches in a scientific community where quantitative approaches are the norm.

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Customer Service Webchat Interactions

The first case study exemplifies the tension that arose from the expectations and procedures of academia and the pragmatic approach that was necessary for practical problem-solving. It is based on consultancy work that was commissioned by a global, USA-based online marketplace, specifically its outsourced customer contact centre in the Philippines. The company uses a third-party provider to recruit, train, coach and regularly appraise Filipino agents who provide customer support via webchat. Because agents are non-native speakers of English, the business is very sensitive to how well these agents are able to interact with their customers who are mainly domiciled in the USA. As a result, the call centre tends to heavily regulate the language exchanges: agents are required to use pre-­ scripted templates when, for example a routine but lengthy explanation is to be made; where there are legal implications for the business in the content explained or where customers become difficult and even abusive. Quality Assurance monitors the exchanges and provides strict guidelines, for example, for putting customers on hold (maximum of 30 seconds). In addition, they also require agents to handle more than one web exchange simultaneously; sometimes up to five. Our aim during the project was to identify strategies that could be taught or trained to ensure smooth communication between customers and agents. As a starting point, the communication consultancy agency— where I was invited as an expert in computer-mediated communication—was given access to 18 chat transcripts that were deemed problematic by the Quality Assurance Manager. After excluding the scripts where the quality problem was not communication related (rather, e.g., misinformation or legal issues), six transcripts remained. Our aim was first to identify and account for the causes of communication breakdown, and then to formulate actionable advice for webchat agents about how to avoid such situations and ensure smooth interaction (as e.g., Forey and Lockwood (2007) advocate). Apart from working with the business, the two researchers involved in the project were committed to publish the results to their scientific community in part due to institutional requirements, where the

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communication of research is the basis of measure of the quality of our work for performance management purposes, for example. Importantly, however, we were driven to publish our work because accounts of collaborations like ours, mainly for confidentiality and/or proprietary reasons, are rare (Ly 2016). Since it is a known fact that access to data and permission to publish typically constitute serious hindrances for business discourse researchers (see e.g., Candlin 2003) the importance of publishing such research was also noted by all our academic reviewers. Constrained by the amount and type of data made available to us and the need for practical, actionable findings, we conducted a round of ‘unmotivated’ reading. This means that we read the transcripts without any prior hypothesis or question in mind to allow patterns or prevalent issues emerge. Considering that the transcripts concerned issues varying in gravity and complexity, and included different types of participants (sellers, buyers, anxious or relaxed) each of the interactions had to be examined individually. This qualitative examination required a turn-by-­ turn examination of the chat scripts. We drew on Interactional Linguistics, an analytical approach whose main aim is an “empirically based understanding of language use and the dependency of linguistic form on social action, and vice versa” (Lindström 2009: 96). The vantage point of linguistic interactional research is to examine a social interaction and “ask how actions or courses of action are implemented with linguistic resources and made interpretable as such for co-participants” (Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 2018: 15). Plainly put, this means an examination of transcripts of naturally-occurring interactional data using analytical categories from descriptive linguistics and explain how linguistic, discursive and non-­ verbal devices contribute to or achieve a specific social action. Figure 3.1 gives an illustration. In Fig. 3.1, the seller is contacting ESHOP (pseudonym used instead of real name) to provide evidence of the posting of an item, which the buyer claims was undelivered. At the beginning of the call, the seller is transferred several times: in fact, it takes 27 minutes and 10 seconds before the case is reviewed in detail. In spite of the length of the entire call being nearly 45 minutes, the case is not solved satisfactorily. The communication issues occur when the caller explains that he is pressed for time and asks for clear instructions/an explanation as to how the case will

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Fig. 3.1  Extract 1: A customer engaging in webchat with ESHOP live

be handled (Extract 1). His turn in line 47 is understood by the agent as leave-taking and greets the customer, who, however, asks for clarification (line 49) and requests a status update (line 52). The disruption in turn adjacency (as illustrated by the arrows which indicate the relevant response to the first turn, see e.g., Berglund 2009) and the grammatical errors made by the agent (word order in line 56, or missing word in line 58) clearly lead to a series of misunderstandings and the customer concludes with the following: Extract 2 [12:18:27 AM] Agent: Thank you for using ESHOP Live Help. [12:19:04 AM] Customer: you are not being very helpful what do you want me to do now? [12:19:53 AM]Customer: I will ring an agent I am not getting anywhere with you am i? bloody useless

This customer service interaction exemplifies two issues we identified across the scripts. The first relates to how disrupted turn adjacency affects

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the flow of communication (Herring 1999). This means that, in text-­ based, synchronous interactions, unlike in spoken conversations, turns do not necessarily follow each other consecutively. While generally such disruption in turn adjacency does not pose problems for communicators, in the cases we examined, especially where speakers are emotionally involved or under pressure, repeated disruptions (lines 51–56 in Extract 1) lead to frustration and misunderstanding, which consequently may lead to lower levels of trust and greater scepticism about the conversational partner’s competence (see Ruhleder and Jordan 2001). Second, in lines 53–54 and 56 we see evidence of conceptualisation problems related to space. ‘Location’ can refer to the physical space inhabited either by the communicators or by the parcel in question, or even a reference to an online space or screen space where the case details are displayed. Similar issues have been found in previous research on mediated customer-­service interactions where the callers’ conceptualisation of space affects the interpretation of the process of problem-solving (cf. Kraan 2005). Our work achieved the consultancy aims in that it resulted in the identification of issues that could be turned into training material and basis for feedback on communication quality. In spite of this, the close, inductive analytical attention that resulted in part from the limited data and in part, as explained above, the wide contextual variety between the available transcripts, attracted criticism from our academic reviewers regarding the replicability and generalisability of our research (Darics and Lockwood 2019a). Our application of a lesser known analytical approach that has its roots in conversation analysis, and combining it with aspects of computer-mediated discourse research led to further criticism of being “hodgepodge” and “difficult to validate how themes or patterns were insightfully and logically identified” (review for Darics and Lockwood 2019b). For our analysis to be accepted by the academic community as credible and contributing to knowledge, we are now working on ways to demonstrate the rigorousness of such a qualitative approach. The case above illustrates the tension between research done for client-­ oriented problem-solving and research that serves the academic community. The tension here is not simply a matter of communication. Instead, the problem lies in how the chosen ways of working transfer into the two distinct settings of academia and of practice and leads to the question of whether such transfer is possible.

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Relevance in Practice

In recent times, there have been increasing calls and increasing pressure for applied linguistic and discourse research to provide practical insights for professionals and society at large (e.g., McIntyre and Price 2018). However, to achieve such practical relevance, there needs to be clarity regarding the relationship between research and its application. We need to consider questions about beneficiaries (Do we produce research that is relevant for the paying client only or do we consider other stakeholders?), immediacy (Should research result in immediate, case-specific applicability or should it be generalisable?) and power (Should we, as researchers, question the status quo? Do we expose power imbalances or exploitation?). Academic research that takes place within universities, as Grey (2001: 28) notes, “has always been fundamentally and deliberately associated with the production of socially useful knowledge”. Such knowledge can only be produced if researchers are able to maintain emotional and cognitive distance from the phenomena being examined, maintain a healthy scepticism and be critical when necessary (Kimberly 2007). Financial motives and ideological dependence and being influenced by the agenda of the commissioning party may seriously hinder or altogether make it impossible for academics to maintain their outsider’s perspective and pursue socially relevant research. And even if there is a strong determination and commitment from researchers to maintain their interest in understanding and exposing aspects of how the world works, these efforts may well be at odds with the outcomes that client-practitioners expect from the collaboration. My second case study is a story of such conflict.

3.1

 ommunication Consultancy in an Income C Generation Team

In this project I worked alongside a social media consultant with an aim to identify and rectify communication issues in a newly created ‘income generation’ (fundraising) team in a local hospice. The team had struggled to meet their income targets. Considering that the hospice only received

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partial state funding, and that the bulk of their budget had to be raised via other means, the newly appointed head of the income generation became concerned about the ineffectiveness of her team. The main aim of the consultancy was to help the team improve engagement and communication with the general public, mainly through social media. In order to gain better understanding of the root causes of the problems and to contextualise the team’s interactions, I decided to get ethnographic insights into the workplace in general and the team in particular. My motivation for conducting such observation was the idea that work practices, everyday interactions and ways of doing things are sites where shared norms and values can be noticed and identified (Nicolini 2011). During my observation period I conducted interviews with the five key team members, recorded their meetings, collected their email communication, and I also saved the team’s social media posts on Twitter. The effort invested in ethnographic observations paid off when the analysis of interview data revealed deep, underlying tensions that affected the work of the team. The interviewees told me that upper management took the advice from an external consultancy for charities, and that the administrative teams in the hospice were extensively re-structured. The analysis of the interviews revealed that the change process was not efficiently communicated and managed (Darics and Clifton 2018). The trauma of layoffs and a need for “organisational healing” (Powley 2013) was clearly evidenced in the interview data. These internal problems transpired into the team’s corporate communication efforts, because collective sense-making and implicit attitudes have a tendency to “leak out”, as communication consultant Ereaut (2013: 34) notes, affecting even controlled communication artefacts. This problem became clear when I analysed the team’s Twitter posts: the initial reading has revealed differences in the communication strategies that team members used to engage with their audiences and facilitated (inter)action. I applied Hyland’s metadiscourse framework (2005) to identify patterns as used by the various tweeters in the team, especially interactional discourse resources that are typically used to “involve readers,…acknowledge and connect with others” (Hyland 2005: 52). The analysis of tweets has exposed—among other aspects—a difference in self-mentions, revealing a contrasting conceptualisation of “self ”.

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The different conceptualisations positioned the writer in three different ways (Table  3.1): either separate from the organisation they represented, part of the entire organisation they represented, or part of a section of the entire organisation. As a result of the writer identity being situated in three different relationships to the organisation, it made it hard for the intended audience to decide who or what they should engage with—and most importantly, for whom or what they should part with their money. The analysis of the hospice’s corporate communication, along with the ethnographic analysis, pointed in the direction that the management of change was not entirely effective, and that current employees struggled to make sense of the new organisational structure and their own and their team’s position within it. It became clear that the consultancy could not advise on communication issues without addressing the deeper underlying problems. However subtle, our attempts to hold up such a mirror to upper management were strongly resisted, to the point where the head of income generation was actually dismissed from her role. This story highlights that success in “creating a common ground” (Alessi and Jacobs 2016) and (re) negotiating research goals to tune with both the researchers and practitioners’ priorities (Roberts 2003) hangs on the willingness to do so from Table 3.1  Positions adopted by tweet writers Self-mention

Personal projection

Writer and referenced organisation are separate

All this month “Name” shop will be hosting… Join the Hospice Learn more about your Hospice Donated to the hospice Our hospice shop

Writer involvement clearly referring to the hospice as a whole Reference unclear: [organisation] as a whole, or income generation team

Pop in and see us Come along and join us We are challenging people We will have a sky dive Email us We’ll introduce … help us go the.. We’re asking you to… We’ve set the

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both parties. If research conducted in the ethos of academic scholarship (i.e., it maintains emotional and cognitive distance, it challenges top-­ down decision-making and power imbalances) is thought to affect the bottom line of the business, or perhaps simply the pride of those involved, achieving a common ground is an unlikely possibility.

4

Discussion and Concluding Thoughts

In the previous sections I have shown that the issues pertaining to academic-­practitioner collaborations, rigour in and practical relevance of research are complex. Previously, as the literature review in this chapter suggests, academics in management and organisational scholarship and in applied linguistic and discourse research have tried to explain these complexities from a variety of angles. One prominent angle is the lack of willingness to engage with, and a problematic connection between, practitioners and academic researchers. Perriton and Hodgson (2013: 145) argue that this conceptualisation “presented as a gap/fissure/chasm that must be bridged/reconciled/communicated across”, predisposes the type of solutions that can be proposed, for example, learning each other’s language and translating between what is thought to be lay and academic language (Alessi and Jacobs 2016) or aligning our ways of seeing and accounting as the two groups attempt to develop an understanding of a phenomenon (Candlin 2002). My aim in this chapter has been to draw attention to the fact that some issues lie much deeper than what the above conceptualisation seems to suggest. Professional communication research seems to have arrived at the same conflict that management research has long struggled with, with an additional burden of feeding from a wide theoretical and methodological repertoire that may lead to disciplinary misunderstandings (Roberts and Sarangi 2003). I illustrated these conflicts through two case studies from my academic-consultant practice. In both of these cases I was invited by consultancy businesses to act as an expert. However, although both were framed as ‘failures’, the lessons we could learn from these are hoped to lead to positive change in the impact agenda of professional communication work in and for professional practice.

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I believe that the acknowledgement of the complexity of the questions related to rigour and relevance is a good first step. The starting point, the need for establishing communication between professionals and academic researchers is necessary, and so is a willingness for the analysts to develop an awareness of the professional context where research takes place (Candlin 2003). However, the efforts to translate between the two contexts should not stop at being able to understand and speak the language (literally and metaphorically) of professional communities. As Kieser and Leiner (2012: 23) advocate, for true and meaningful academic-­ practitioner collaborations, researchers need to become bilingual facilitators who are “able to recognise and transmit implications of scientific analysis for practical problems (and) able to describe a practical situation in such a way that researchers are able to associate one or more relevant scientific concepts and to provide interpretations that practitioners might find inspiring”. To gain such dual competence, the differing agendas and priorities of the two camps should be acknowledged. Building on Kimberly’s categories (2007), I suggest these are as follows: • Time: While practice requires immediate remedy, academic research has a much longer horizon, both in terms of dissemination of results, but also in the pursuit of generalisability of research and long-term impact (Kimberly 2007). • Applicability: Closely linked to the above is the question of directly applicable knowledge. In applied linguistics this need often manifests in the expectation of “off the peg” prescriptive communication advice (Baxter 2017). Scholarship, on the other hand, notes the futility of such advice and promotes learning through reflexivity and analytical thinking (see Mullany forthcoming 1; Darics 2019). • Methodological discrepancies: To meet real client needs, as I have shown in Case Study 1, research methods have to be solution-driven and pragmatic. As Kimberly notes, at times the demands and the context of a specific project require “compromise with the criteria of research excellence and integrity” (2007: 144), and necessitate the use of research methods that do not pass the scrutiny of the academic community.

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• Criticality: Practical relevance and critical analysis, as we have seen in Case Study 2, are not always compatible. On the one hand, researchers may become heavily influenced by the agenda of the client which may prevent them to approach their data in an impartial way. Research is thus governed by practice, not science, and certainly not the type of science that aims to contribute to social good. On the other hand, when researchers are in the position to maintain their criticality, it is still questionable if decision makers in organisations are willing or able to act on the critique (Koller 2018). • Beneficiaries: Closely linked to the above is the question of the beneficiaries of research. While it is clear that the primary beneficiaries of commissioned consultancy research are those who actually pay for it, do academics have an obligation to speak up in questions concerning ethical or moral judgements or when, for example human well-being is at stake? Once acknowledged, I encourage researchers and the institutions they operate in to consider their positions against these tension points. For the research community, in particular, for gatekeepers of scientific communities, in order for the impact agenda to take effect there has to be a greater appreciation of the new theories that are required to account for issues of immediate, context-dependent, practical relevance (Van de Ven and Johnson 2006), and the perhaps alien-speaking or writing practices that are necessary to engage audiences across both disciplinary boundaries and the professional-academic divide (Roberts 2003). For researchers, taking a stance regarding the immediacy, applicability and applied methodologies for consultancy or collaborative research are likely to be determined by the requirements of the commissioned research. The dilemma of beneficiaries and criticality, however, remains. I believe that considering these questions will allow researchers to make decisions about the process, design and communication of their project: for example, whether it is possible and how for the lessons from a collaborative or consultancy research project to advance theoretical research knowledge (Van de Ven and Johnson 2006), or how these lessons can be turned into possibilities for others to learn and benefit from (Kimberly 2007). This latter point particularly concerns engaging audiences who have decision-making powers, and using consultancy opportunities to “smuggle in” critical viewpoints that are meant to reconcile

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organisational agendas with human well-being (Koller 2018: 37, see also Mullany and Trickett, this volume). Finally, for research institutions and funding bodies, the above described tension should raise questions about the all-encompassing agenda of impact. As we have seen, the needs of the various end-user groups often conflict with the overall aims of academic research, therefore immediate applicability is simply not feasible. The production of knowledge which does not have direct relevance or impact, as Grey notes, “is a public good because it is the price to pay for the possibility of producing useful knowledge… If the pursuit of knowledge is only validated through the production of effective action the irony is that action will be much less effective because protected experimentation (both literal and metaphorical) will disappear, and ideas doomed wastefully to be tested in the world of application rather than that of consideration” (2001: 29). Addressing problems in today’s world—whether these concern immediate issues in a business or professional organisation, much wider social issues, or the mutual relationship between the two—clearly requires both practical and theoretical knowledge. By making explicit and acknowledging the problems that may arise from the tension between relevance and rigour, it is hoped that in professional communication research we will be able to retain both our academic integrity as well as the potential for future impact outside academia.

References Alessi, G. M., & Jacobs, G. (2016). The Ins and Outs of Business and Professional Discourse Research. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Alvesson, M., & Kärreman, D. (2000). Taking the Linguistic Turn in Organizational Research. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 36, 136–158. Baxter, J. (2017). Resolving a Gender and Language Problem in Women’s Leadership: Consultancy Research in Workplace Discourse. Discourse & Communication, 11(2), 141–159. Berglund, T. Ö. (2009). Disrupted Turn Adjacency and Coherence Maintenance in Instant Messaging Conversations. Language@Internet, (6), article 2. Branson, R. (2014). How Language Shapes the Way We Work. Retrieved from https://www.virgin.com/richardbranson/how-language-shapes-the-waywe-work.

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4 Language, Gender and Leadership: Applying the Sociolinguistics of Narrative and Identity in East Africa Masibo Lumala and Louise Mullany

1

Introduction

This chapter focuses on an international research collaboration between academics in sociolinguistics and communication studies with East African businesses, NGOs, charities, policy makers and other global stakeholders, including UN Women. The collaboration grew out of the founding of a global research Network, funded by the UK Government’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), through the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). An AHRC grant was awarded to set up the Language, Gender and Leadership Network, initially in Kenya and Uganda (grant reference number: AH/R004439/1). The GCRF is dedicated to countries classified as lower-middle income countries (LMIC) according to the international Organisation for Economic M. Lumala Moi University, Eldoret, Kenya L. Mullany (*) University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 L. Mullany (ed.), Professional Communication, Communicating in Professions and Organizations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41668-3_4

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Cooperation and Development. In order to be eligible as a research site and as a collaborator, stakeholders, including academics, have to be based in countries that are also in receipt of Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) from the UK Government. Our professional communication analysis examines the interrelationship between language, gender and leadership in businesses and organisations in urban and rural settings, focusing on the sociolinguistics of narrative and the socio-political power of storytelling. We have analysed narratives from a unique dataset of 100 stories elicited from professional women across Kenya and Uganda. The stories are life history narratives of personal experience, as well as the vicarious experience of colleagues, family and friends in their communities, from a wide cross-section of rural and urban professions including: farmers, market traders, entrepreneurs, NGO leaders, teachers, lawyers, engineers, academics, politicians, religious leaders. Following the broad definition of ‘professional’ that is adopted in this volume, the women who make up our data can occupy paid or unpaid positions (i.e., standing as a parliamentary candidate, being a voluntary professional e.g., a teacher in a school who is not on any payroll), or positions that can bring financial reward, but this is by no means guaranteed, for example, farming. ‘Professional’ thus applies to any work that is undertaken outside of a domestic setting, in a range of different contexts including a variety of rural and urban workplace settings. The broad definition of ‘professional’ here enables the different everyday lived realities of the sometimes precarious East African economies of Uganda and Kenya to be covered. The Language, Gender and Leadership Network overall aims to investigate how to bring more economic independence and increase the health and welfare of women through empowering them to get into workplaces in the first place, and then, once established, how to grow their roles, through both advocacy and activism. The advocacy and activist work that has emerged from this Network has been based on professional communication narrative research collaborations with multiple stakeholders in civil society. Our core focus has been to identify and analyse the key challenges and barriers facing women and girls for them to become a successful generation of professionals in their communities. We have aimed to cover a wide variety of professions in East Africa, particularly those that

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have been traditionally male-dominated. A key goal has also been to identify stories of inspiration to identify role models and mentors who have had successful professional careers, to motivate the next generation of women and girls to succeed, even when the odds are stacked against them due to deeply entrenched institutional power structures. Through a sociolinguistics of narrative approach, we have investigated the identity constructions of communities of  women, including the opportunities and successes they have achieved, alongside the challenges and barriers that they have faced in their lives, both prior to entering workplaces and then whilst within the workplace. Through these data we have added new empirical evidence to professional communication research from a narrative-based perspective, and created practical tools to inspire, mentor and create cohesion amongst geographically disparate groups. In this chapter, we highlight the specific socio-cultural challenges that are emergent from the narratives, and detail the subsequent advocacy and activism work of our Network’s membership and the research impact it has created, producing information of key relevance to policy makers, NGOs and charities, in the region and globally.

2

 ackground: Creating a Global B Research Network

The Network was created by the chapter’s authors in collaboration with the Institute for Social Transformation (IST), in its role as official Project Partner. IST is an NGO dedicated to changing leadership models in contemporary African societies, focusing in particular upon empowering women within their own communities, bringing transformative change to male-dominated professional arenas. IST has established bases across seven African countries, including Kenya and Uganda, with its headquarters in Kampala. Its other countries of operation are Tanzania, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan. IST is committed to working in collaboration  with academics, including an openness to integrating findings of academic research and data collection into its advocacy and activism work. IST’s pan-African reach has provided an excellent basis through

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which to roll out our Network’s research findings and resources, designed to change and influence future practices. Our other official collaborator is Dr Roshni Mooneeram, as Project Consultant. She is a communications consultant, former linguistics academic and corporate trainer with multinational organisations, including those with bases in the Global South (see Chap. 6, this volume, for an account of her consultancy work). She is also a member of the African Leadership Network and the Africa Trade and Impact Council, two organisations that have strong pan-African reach, again enabling our research findings to reach a variety of different stakeholders. The Network has brought together academics and researchers from a number of subject areas including Sociolinguistics, Communication Studies, Gender Studies, Narrative Studies, Life Writing, Organisational Studies, Business Studies, Education, Health Humanities, Public Health, Law and Politics, to work alongside a number of non-academic stakeholders, including pan-African and global NGOs, charities and professional organisations. As an interdisciplinary network of language and gender experts, our rationale behind developing a global language, gender and leadership network was to address a core political issue at the centre of professional communication work on gender, namely gender inequality in professional roles. In doing so, we placed the centrality of the human experiences of women and girls in developing countries at its core, to work towards achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5, Gender Equality. In order for this project to succeed, forms of advocacy and activism were built in from its inception. It was clear that our multiple stakeholders needed to work effectively together, firstly by drawing upon academic sociolinguistic research of elicited narratives and then practically applying this, in collaboration with businesses, NGOs and other third sector organisations. We considered how sociolinguistic tools and techniques could play an influential role in uncovering gender bias, harassment and discrimination and other key issues related to health, well-being and the welfare of women and girls, alongside the communicative problems that exist in LMICs. Our advocacy and activist goals align directly with key criteria for bringing sustainable change in international development, identified through a number of the UN’s SDGs 2030, along with the

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findings of UN Women’s (2014) World Survey on the Role of Women in Development. These sources have argued that, if sustainable development and gender equality are ever to be achieved, research and interventions are required to embrace women’s equal participation as leaders and decision-­makers within their own societies. The UN (2016: 2) argues that gender equality is, ‘not only a fundamental human right, but a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world’. However, there is still much work to be done, hence the coining of SDG 5 (see Sect. 4 for further discussion). Numerous commentators have continued to note that women and girls represent half of the world’s population and therefore half of its potential (e,g., Kristof and Wudunn 2010), but nonetheless, gender inequality persists globally and stagnates social, political and economic progress (World Economic Forum 2020). Women continue to be underrepresented at all levels of political leadership (UN Women 2018). Across East Africa and a number of other areas of the world, inequalities faced by girls can begin right at birth and follow them all their lives. However, as Atanga et al. (2012) point out, African women face a number of socio-­ political challenges, with gender being just one component in cultural contexts where the challenges are manifold: Challenges for many African women in particular are immense and numerous, gender being only one. Many African women are confronted with poverty which stems from the burden of caring for and feeding a family (often, today, without the economic assistance of a husband), against a socio-cultural background where women are largely, in any case, responsible for the upbringing of the children with little support from men. There tend to be unequal job opportunities in what are traditionally male-­ dominated societies and, additionally, women often lack access to land (due to traditional inheritance laws), which has its own economic impact (Goheen 1996). Because African societies tend to be essentially agrarian, poor access to farm land then becomes a primary cause of poverty. Family poverty may also lead to gender-based violence if, for example, a wife supplements the family income by working outside the home and the man’s traditional status as breadwinner is threatened. (Atanga et al. 2012: 14)

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Therefore, in addition to having SDG 5 at its core, the Network has also investigated language, gender and leadership through the following, interrelated SDGs: • Language, Gender Identity and Well-Being (Goal 3): how have women’s health problems caused barriers to success in the workplace and limited access to education and future leadership positions? What success stories are there where barriers have been overcome? What challenges remain in place to ensure regular educational attendance with FGM and menstruation? What role can language and effective public health communication play in bringing about socio-cultural change? • Language, Gender Identity and Quality Education (Goal 4): including ensuring girls are in school; improving access to language and literacy for girls and women, language and gender equality awareness in the classroom; eradicating early and forced marriage. • Language, Gender Identity and Decent Work Practices for All (Goal 8): How evident is sex-role stereotyping? How can it be broken down? How have successful women gained the communicative skills to lead in public life, as politicians, entrepreneurs and business leaders? Have they changed language norms? Are prejudice and stereotypical language practices evident? How can they be broken down? • Language and Gender Identity: Peace, Justice and Institutions (Goal 16): what role is played by socio-cultural norms and practices, family dynamics and religion to restricting and enabling leadership development in post-conflict societies? Along with our other NGOs, charities and Network members, IST acts as an important bridge between advocacy and activism work within local communities. IST’s leadership training and interventions in the workplace are specifically designed to transform productivity and bring sustainability to entrepreneurial businesses, with a particular focus on supporting women to become successful entrepreneurs. One of their largest current projects focuses upon empowering women to become market women entrepreneurs in urban and rural districts. They have supported and developed various initiatives to enhance the voices, opinions and decision-making rights of women within markets, a traditionally

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male-dominated public space, so that women market entrepreneurs’ needs can be heard, and women can develop spaces for their own decision-­ making powers, have their own fair share of workplace spaces and work towards their own financial independence. Communication is a fundamental way in which legitimate participation in public domains is measured and achieved. Without maximising the potential of its women and girls within professional domains, sustainable economic development will not result. All stakeholders in the Network, regardless of their professional role responsibilities, share a political commitment to openly engaging in advocacy work, utilising academic research, which operates as a form of applied sociolinguistics in action (see also Mullany forthcoming 1, Mullany, this volume). At the basis of this work is the motivation to empower women and girls into professional leadership roles in their communities. Often this advocacy work turns into activism, as the two blend into one another, with the advocacy work providing the underpinning evidence which then informs gender-based community activism. Many members of our Network actively campaign to bring about positive social and cultural changes to the lives of women and girls in Uganda and Kenya, and they do this on a range of issues which have emerged as significant from the narratives we analysed as part of this project (see Sect. 4). To summarise, the overall aims and objectives of the Network have been as follows: • To develop a successful Network to give an international platform to those who have previously been marginalised, spoken for or silenced • To identify the key barriers to women’s empowerment, leadership and cultural change through narrative data, to explore how these barriers can be overcome • To identify narratives demonstrating best practice that will inspire others, equipping communities of women and girls with the aspirations and beliefs required to succeed in future leadership positions • To develop and launch a global website, demonstrating the power of global online community-based activism and how digital transformations can empower previously marginalised groups

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• To oversee the creation of a short story book with local communities, for use by local, national and international NGOs, charities and educationalists, encouraging creativity and enterprise, especially in hard to reach, rural communities • To identify inspirational narratives for the creation of drama-based training interventions, to be delivered by local NGOs and charities • To enable women and girls to share stories to build sustainable, cohesive global communities where members empower and inspire each other through collective action • To inform and influence policy makers, NGOs and charities on the gender-based challenges currently being faced at local, national and international levels, as told from the perspectives of women and girls themselves • To create an innovative and unique corpus of narrative research data that can be built upon to track the development of language, gender and leadership in the developing world Our Network has grown across its different component groups following our three initial Networking events funded by AHRC. The Network was launched in Kampala in April 2018 at an inaugural conference hosted by IST. In October 2018, the second Networking conference took place in Kenya in Eldoret, hosted by Moi University, on the specific theme of ‘Challenges and Opportunities for Women in Business and Political Leadership’. The final event took place at the University of Nottingham in the UK in September 2019, where the move towards the pan-African and then global stage of the Network was introduced, with a focus on the sustainability of ideas and practices, with East Africa still at the Network’s core.

3

Methods and Data

Despite calls to expand the research field of language and gender to include developing countries (e.g., Mills and Mullany 2011), only a handful of studies have appeared (e.g., McElhinny 2011; Atanga et al. 2012, 2013; Atanga and Djimeli 2015; Jones 2015; Kammoun 2015).

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Flowerdew (2007) and Atanga et al. (2012) provide detailed discussions as to why they think this is the case, including a crucial lack of access to research funding in African institutions. The GCRF awards in the UK represent a step in the right direction, with collaborative work with African universities being actively supported, though there is still a long way to go. The focus of our project was to investigate narratives as devices to capture human experience through sociolinguistic identity constructions (cf. Schiffrin 1996), which then informs academics and other stakeholders, including NGOs, charities, policy makers and women and girls themselves. A foundational principle of the Network has been to place the voices of women and girls at its core through a sociolinguistic focus on life history narratives. The value and importance of analysing life history data is emphasised by Schiff and Noy (2006: 398), who state that ‘life stories allow us to explore subjective understandings in great complexity and draw interpretations about how persons make sense of self and world’. They go on to point out the importance of shared meanings in life stories, because they are ‘a consequence of growing up in a family, a peer group, a time in history, a language community and a culture…we inherit the values and stories that are esteemed in these contexts through our participation with others’ (Schiff and Noy 2006: 399). Agency is also an important component to analyse when studying narratives of identity, in terms of how the narrator constructs the power dynamics of the story. As De Fina (2006: 353) points out, researchers have analysed agency by looking at the ‘linguistic choices indexing particular roles such as action verbs and referring expressions’. In sociolinguistic work on professional communication and gender, the power of narrative has been demonstrated to be an effective method through which gendered professional identity constructions can be analysed (Holmes 2006; Mullany 2006, 2010). We will examine shared meanings, agency and linguistic choices in our data from a sociolinguistic perspective, alongside the application of Bucholtz and Hall’s (2010) seminal model of identity construction to examine the role of indexicality, stance and subject positioning of our narrators in relation to representations of their gendered and professional identities.

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The life stories of women and girls from a range of backgrounds, professions, ages and geographical locations form the narrative dataset. The project has collected over 100 contemporary narratives in Uganda and Kenya to investigate emergent patterns through constructions of the self, others and groups, where key reflections regarding language, gender and leadership can be found. The narratives have been collected through a variety of methods including those elicited in interviews by members of the project team, written narrative accounts and also from oral narratives of personal and vicarious experience delivered as part of conference presentations at our networking events. Our dataset incorporates a broad range of professionals, including narratives from participants occupying male-dominated professional spaces and roles. To ensure that we were able to capture narratives within different communities, we needed a flexible approach to data collection and worked closely with IST, our project consultant, members of our steering committee and Network members in  local geographical locations. This approach, with key gatekeepers embedded within local communities, enabled access to interviewees and participants via established leaders who were trusted figures within local communities. Space precludes a full discussion of the methods (see Mullany 2020), but the interviews were designed to be interactive and discursive, with sets of questions across three interrelated themes: (1) current career, (2) aspirations: gender, family and community, and (3) gender politics, leadership and culture. We also collected written narratives of personal and vicarious experience from participants who preferred to write their stories, using the spoken narrative questions as prompts for written textual production. Finally, when capturing narratives as part of individuals’ recorded conference presentations, presenters had deliberately and consciously embedded narrative life histories as a part of their presentation’s content, due to the narrative theme and to align with the Network’s overall aims and objectives of narrative data collection. Oral narratives in the dataset are not restricted to English and have been collected in local dialectal varieties, including Iteso, translated into English via interpreters (see Mullany 2020). All conference presentations and written narratives were produced in English. Within sociolinguistics, there has been a dominant research focus on narratives of personal experience (e.g., Labov 1972, 2013). However, more recent work (e.g. Norrick

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2013) has called for examinations of narratives of vicarious, as well as personal experience. We consider this essential in terms of accessing and evaluating community-based, collectivist socio-cultural experiences of shared meanings, including different communities’ deeply ingrained socio-cultural attitudes to gender—this is a significant research gap in both narrative studies and language and gender research. Another innovation within our unique dataset was a focus upon narrative projections of ‘future selves’ (Schiff and Noy 2006) to assess patterns of ambition, aspiration and how availability of resources matches these ambitions, thus expanding research from stories of events in past tense, that have actually take place, to projected stories of ’ideal selves’ in the future.

4

Data Findings

Within the narrative dataset, participants’ experiences range from those who have already succeeded in leadership positions and have strong leadership reputations, those who have occupied multiple roles and different professional identities, through to those who wish to be future leaders. The detailed qualitative analysis here demonstrates the value of conducting a sociolinguistics of identity narrative analysis. Example 1 is taken from Janet, a Ugandan farmer from a rural community in north-eastern Uganda who has succeeded in a male-dominated field: Example 1 After facing a number of challenges, especially when I lost my husband, I decided to interact with other women. It is important that we come together as women to fight poverty in our households. Also to support the children especially because I had been left with five orphans. I lacked the resources, the necessary resources to help take the children to school. So, through coming together as a group at least we have been in a position to fight those challenges, much as we have not yet managed to finish everything. And in the group we’re empowered with the knowledge and skills for organic farming. So after empowering us with those skills we were able even to save money because we got also involved in the saving group the money to join hands to save some money. That is the money

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we are using for education, but also because there was a challenge of the long distance to the nearby schools…So after considering the idea of the school we are happy that some volunteers accepted to join us in teaching the children, so for us as women in this community, we have agreed to contribute money, take care of those people’s welfare, much as we are not paying them enough but we are very grateful that those teachers have accepted to offer service. (Janet, Uganda) In terms of identity construction, initially notable in Janet’s narrative is the pronoun transition from ‘I’ to ‘we’, signalling how she highlights the collective group empowerment of women in this rural community. She starts her narrative by positioning herself alone, ‘I lost my husband’, ‘I lacked the resources’ and through the passive construction ‘I had been left’. Her stance shifts to one of empowerment through collective group action, using a declarative to position herself as part of a group of women who are empowered when together—she directly indexicalises gender twice in the first two sentences, using the collective noun ‘women’ and then twice describes their collective strength ‘to fight’: ‘we come together as women to fight poverty’, ‘we have been in position to fight’; her use of the common conceptual metaphor of war and battle works to emphasise the strength of collective group action. She explicitly also highlights a shift in stance from being alone to being collectively powerful through the noun phrase ‘the group’, explicitly declaring that ‘in the group we’re empowered’. She uses ‘group’ again as a key identity marker, to emphasise ‘coming together as a group’. The group has been trained by a local organisation, known as MIDA, in organic farming techniques and micro credit and savings, which has supported them to set up a women’s co-operative. MIDA are agentless in Janet’s narrative, ‘So after empowering us’, which assists her in emphasising the power that the group of women have acquired for themselves. Janet then positions the group as successful farmers, mothers and school founders, who all belong to the collective ‘saving group’, as they have jointly invested their farming money to start their own school. Here, Janet uses the metaphor ‘join hands’ to emphasise the collective decision-­ making of what to do with the money, for the good of the wider community. This collective decision-making and shared positive evaluations

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of the development of the school can be seen through the sustained use of collective ‘we’ in parallel structures, when Janet’s narrative lens focuses on how the school was started—‘we are happy’, ‘we have agreed’, ‘we are very grateful’. Examples 2 and 3 are both from Kenyan women. Example 2 focuses on a range of professional roles that the narrator has occupied during her professional life history: Example 2 One day I asked my brother-in-law for 100 shillings, which he gave my sister to give me and believe me it was turning point in my life. I helped the girls who dropped out of schools and those that did not get opportunities because of poverty in the area. I took the money and bought two t-shirts of which I sold each at 250 and got 500 shillings. Thereafter I went and bought others. I really wanted to learn how to use a computer and I used the money to go to college whereby I learnt and bought my own computer, started a computer services business which included typesetting and internet services. Thereafter I engaged in youth activities in my district, whereby I was elected as a youth leader and thereafter a provincial youth leader. From there, I went to Busia to do my business, running away from home because of poor business opportunities. In Nambale, Busia County, I opened the business where I helped the girls who dropped out of schools and those that did not get opportunities because of poverty in the area. Due to this I vied to be the MP of Nambale Constituency. Being the only woman and a young person who is not born nor married in the area, it was not easy even campaigning. During my campaigns, I rarely slept in the house because of too many threats. I used to run at night. Every day I felt like sleeping in my house. I slept on trees, ran in my night dress, just to mention but a few. After the politics, I registered my NGO called Young Leaders of Kenya. I started visiting schools, doing mentorship to reduce early marriages, the spread of HIV and other STIs, based on the fact that Busia is the highway of East Africa, with several businesses including prostitution. (Pascaliah, Kenya) Pascaliah’s narrative life history rapidly takes us through a range of different professions and professional identities that she has occupied,

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starting with where she evaluates the act of asking her brother-in-law for 100 shillings, drawing on the conceptual metaphor, ‘life is a journey’, emphasising the poignancy of this event through the noun phrase, ‘the turning point in my life’. She then represents herself as a fully agentive individual, through repeated use of first person pronoun ‘I’ and presents her life history of how she used her market entrepreneurship skills to sell t-shirts, then set up her own computing business, then become a youth worker and advocate for the rights of women and girls, which led to her standing as a parliamentary candidate: ‘I took the money’, ‘I sold each’, ‘I opened the business’, ‘I helped the girls’, ‘I vied to be the MP’. Whilst she initially positions herself as a successful entrepreneur, this alignment shifts when she uses the declarative to state that she relocated to Busia ‘to do my business, running away from home’. Although she has been the clear agent of her actions, the choice of the phrase ‘running away from home’ has connotations of youthfulness and of her leaving her early life behind. She rapidly covers a range of topics, including poverty, health and well-being and sexual exploitation. She positions herself as attempting to embark upon a career as an MP due to her life experience helping girls who had dropped out of school. She directly indexicalises her gender identity, along with other social identity variables including her young age (cf. Mullany and Yoong 2016), place of birth and her unmarried status ‘being the only woman and a young person who is not born nor married in the area’, named as contributing factors that worked against her ability to succeed. She tells of how, during her political campaign, she suffered ‘too many threats’ resulting in her deciding not to sleep in her house; her continual use of the first person pronoun tells what she did in a succession of declaratives: ‘I rarely slept’, ‘I slept on trees’, ‘I used to run all night’, demonstrating the impact of the ‘threats’ on her personal safety. She did not get elected, which is passed over quickly in the narrative via the very brief, temporal phrase ‘after the politics’. At this point, she moves on to her next career move as leader of an NGO, again through herself as sole agent, signalled through the singular first person ‘I’ and possessive pronoun ‘my’: ‘I registered my NGO’, ‘I started visiting schools’. In contrast to Janet in Example 1, Pascaliah positions herself as a lone individual who has succeeded despite the barriers that have been put in her way. Her narrative tells of how she has re-invented her professional

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identity in multiple ways across different professional groups. Her style has clear echoes of Holmes’ (2006) ‘hero’ narrative, a stereotypical masculinist style, where professionals succeed in the face of adversity and tell stories of their own personal victory against the odds; a key linguistic feature of this approach is the use of the first person pronouns. However, in contrast with Holmes’ (2006) data, a pivotal part of Pascaliah’s story is her unsuccessful attempt at becoming an MP, the most prestigious role of all the professions that she has tried. Whilst she does not dwell on this in her narrative report, it is clear how she evaluates the intersections of her social identity categories of gender, age and unmarried status as collectively working against her as a credible candidate, making her the target of ‘threats’. Example 3 represents a different life-stage, taken from a University student reflecting upon her childhood and how traditional cultural practices can damage girls’ chances of even  entering any workplace in the first place: Example 3 Just like any other girl in my village, I never treasured formal education as a great deal. My main aim was to grow up faster, reach puberty, get circumcised, get married off and start bearing children, my own children. Wasn’t that an amazing thought? Being the firstborn girl, my father wanted to have me initiated and immediately married off so that he could perhaps get some bride wealth to pay for his second wife. An uncircumcised woman is considered to be useless and an outcast in my own community. Even as a university student, and the only female in public university from my locality, I’m regarded as an outcast and at no point should I address “men and women of the society” as I’m termed a betrayer and unclean. That’s why I bear this bracelet in my right hand just to avert being punished for lack of identification from the real women in the society… Mine hasn’t been a smooth journey to help reduce the rate of FGM in the community. I have faced so many life-threatening challenges which has forced me to stay away from home during certain months of the year. I have seen many young girls lose their precious lives because of FGM… something needs to be done. (Lilian, Kenya) Lilian begins by positioning herself as directly aligned with ‘any other girl’ in her village who did not ‘treasure formal education’. In a succession

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of short verb phrases she expresses her initial life aim to ‘get circumcised’, ‘get married’, ‘start bearing children’. Her use of a rhetorical question, ‘wasn’t that an amazing thought?’ signals a shift in her alignment against this trajectory. Although she does not articulate exactly what happened, it is clear that her life did not follow this route (in an additional session at the Eldoret conference, she explained how her mother had intervened and saved her from undergoing FGM). She then disaligns herself from this life course and negatively evaluates her father, who becomes the agent of FGM ‘my father wanted to have me initiated’. She then disembodies herself, presenting herself instead as a financial commodity through the noun phrase ‘bride wealth’, for her father to use to ‘pay for his second wife’ (not her mother). She then goes on to declare that ‘an uncircumcised woman’ is pejoratively considered an ‘outcast’, a ‘betrayer’ who is ‘useless’ and ‘unclean’, highly negative subject positions that she now occupies ‘in my own community’ due to not undergoing FGM. From a sociolinguistic perspective, the silencing of Lilian’s voice and the prevention of any opportunity to talk to her fellow community members is particularly striking—she declares ‘at no point should I address “men and women of the society”’. She then goes on to tell how she has undergone ‘life-threatening challenges’ as she has attempted to reduce the rate of FGM in her community (discussed further in Sect. 4). It is the intention that the analysis in Examples 1–3 has given detailed illustration of the power of our narratives dataset to inform, inspire and bring knowledge of complex socio-cultural situations where women are trying to succeed in establishing themselves as legitimate leaders in entrepreneurship and a range of other professions, including farming, as NGO leaders, school founders, youth workers, parliamentary candidates. There are stories of barriers and challenges to success, and how resilience and continual efforts mean that socio-cultural landscapes are slowly changing in relation to women’s human rights. Overall, through our sociolinguistic narrative analysis, we have identified the following eight socio-cultural, economic and political research themes, which are being followed up through collective advocacy and activism, discussed further in Sect. 4: • Health and well-being: Narratives of how ill-health and lack of well-­ being affect educational and training opportunities to become profes-

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• • • •

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sionals in the first place, and how these issues can affect women’s abilities to stay in the workplace. This includes narratives about FGM (Example 3), menstrual hygiene, rape, gender-based violence, pregnancy, birth, childcare, childrearing, lack of health education; taboos surrounding women’s health and lack of access to appropriate healthcare resources. Access to education: Narratives include the reporting of numerous initiatives from NGOs and charities to ensure that girls continue in education beyond primary level, including mentoring, counselling, teacher-training, school camps, eradicating damaging gendered language and gendered discourses in the family and classroom; ensuring the inclusion of men and boys in all issues regarding the fundamental importance of all girls’ rights to access education. Economic empowerment: Narratives documenting lack of access to finances, capital and land rights of women, with limited ability to own property to lead more independent lives. Eradicating poverty: Access to water and irrigation, capacity-building through entrepreneurship and innovative agrarian initiatives. The role of religion: Including the importance of faith leaders and their influence within local communities, including families. The role of men: the importance of global movements including #heforshe, the role of male champions and men in key advocacy roles, men who identify as feminists and the importance of inclusion of all in terms of successful advocacy. Changing the sociocultural practices of men within communities. Historically there has been too much emphasis on women needing to change; instead, a key issue for the Network moving forward is, how can men change  and become changemakers? The role of politics: Women facing additional barriers to get elected; women MPs often seen as second-class MPs due to the political structure of having two MPs, one a women’s representative, for each district within parliament. The importance of politicians delivering on promises made during election campaigns for women’s rights at work and issues of women’s health and well-being.

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• Diversity, culture and tradition: Ensuring buy-in from local chiefs and community leaders to change damaging practices; the recruitment of more women pastors, chiefs and so on.

5

Impact, Changing Practices and Future Development

By combining our collective experience and expertise, the Network has been able to identify the complex challenges affecting women and girls’ career aspirations and progression, informed by narrative data capture. This has taken place alongside a focus on the core sociolinguistic skills required to succeed as entrepreneurs, business leaders and politicians, evidenced through the stories that women and girls tell  (Mullany 2020). The Network has explored how barriers can be overcome, capturing narratives of success to inspire others, via a series of interactive resources. By empowering women through the stories they tell, the Network has successfully given a platform to those who have previously been marginalised, spoken for or silenced. It directly aligns itself with the World Humanitarian Summit’s (2016) view that women and girls need to be empowered from within their local communities to become effective change agents and leaders. The findings inform policy makers of the key gender-based challenges being faced in countries in receipt of ODA, alongside equipping communities of women and girls with the aspirations, beliefs and skills to challenge institutional systems and succeed in leadership positions in multicultural settings. The Network has three main outputs: a website, short story book and drama-training resources. We have launched the globally accessible website, where participants share narrative experiences, where their stories can act as role models, mentors and figures of inspiration for each other. Alongside this, to address those living in remote communities currently without regular electricity and/or limited Internet access, the Network has co-created drama-based training interventions and a 32-page narrative storybook with our members and project partners. These are being used as empowerment and training tools by our Network

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members, Project Partners, educational charities, NGOs and professional organisations working on addressing gender inequalities in Uganda and Kenya, as well as by Western-based charities who work in East African countries. The website and interactive training resources provide a unique corpus of life-history narratives from women and girls in Kenya and Uganda at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Our narrative findings are also used as a resource to influence and inform policy-­making decisions, through the Network’s contacts at UN Women Africa and through our Project Consultant’s role as a policy maker, and member of the pan-African Trade & Impact Network and the African Leadership Network. The website seeks to provide a point of contact between the Network and other stakeholders, especially the individuals and organisations involved in the research. The website is also designed to be used for monitoring and evaluation of progress and to showcase various steps being taken by different countries to empower women and narrow gender inequalities. The aim is to reach our target audiences easily, regardless of geographical distances. The website also has a ‘Resources Centre’ for advice, support and linkages to women and girls in developing countries. Both women and men will be encouraged to share knowledge and experiences with regard to any challenges thereof. Going forward, the website will serve as a platform for advocacy, lobbying and activist campaigns on an ongoing basis, all continuing to be informed by sociolinguistic identities research. The Network has had a significant impact on conference participants who have become full Network members. Eight months after the Eldoret conference, we returned to participants who had provided narratives and asked them how the Network training and participation had influenced their behaviour. The following testimony demonstrates that, with empowerment, women in developing countries are making differences to their communities. By sharing experiences from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania  at the Eldoret conference, participants had gone home and done something positive for girls and women. Network member and narrative contributor Pascaliah (Example 2)  had this to say after being inspired by the narratives at the two-day Eldoret event:

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After the Eldoret Conference, I have now met more girls, especially in schools, mentored with more experts and donated sanitary towels and pants to vulnerable schools. I have also been able to get several girls back to school together with my gender technical working committee that I formed and Chair at the county level. 4 men have been jailed for life for raping children through my efforts. I did push for a gender desk in every department and now most women are cared for wherever they approach our county offices. The education department has employed 65% trained ECD teachers who are women. I am currently pushing for more funds to train women on basic business skills.

Additionally, following the training and recommendations from the conference, Lilian, narrator of Example 3, has conducted a great deal of advocacy and activist work to protect girls from FGM and keep them in education—critical to empowering them into future professional careers. She reports as follows: Nearly eight months after the Language, Gender, Leadership Conference held in Eldoret, its impact has really been felt within Tiaty Constituency, most especially Tangulbei, Kolowa and Tirioko Ward respectively. I personally engaged myself in putting combined efforts alongside other willing partners to help fight harmful traditional practices, child abuse in regard to promotion of a healthy environment for all girls within Tiaty Constituency. Some of the major achievements so far are: • Forming the Organization Tiaty Tumaini Girls Foundation that advocates for the rights of girls, fights retrogressive cultures most especially FGM and child marriage, donation of sanitary towels and frequent seminars. • Advocacy work in a range of schools, training in life skills, health education, and alternative rites of passages for girls, career development, drug and substance abuse; education of students that they are girls and not brides and that marriage is not a career. Engagement of students and pupils in music, drama and poetry as a convenient way to communicate to the community on their rights and responsibilities, especially during Community Barazas and functions;

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• Distribution of sanitary towels; volunteering with Maternal Aid for Mothers in Africa organization (MAMA) in sensitization and advocating for proper maternal aid for all mothers in Orus (Tangulbei) plus free training for traditional birth attendants (TBAs) and finally, free maternal services. • I equally act as an education ambassador in promoting girl child education within the region. I engage with parents during closing ceremonies and meetings in order to motivate them to educate their children regardless of their genders. Most girls are not allowed to go to school; this has to be stopped immediately. Lilian then points out some key challenges that are affecting operations in her efforts. One of the most significant of these, in respect to language, gender and the professions, is her repeated observation about the lack of voice that she has within her own community. On this occasion, she again openly states the denial of the opportunity for her to speak in public spaces, as ‘the community regards an uncircumcised girl as a toddler and has less or no chance to address the public/Barazas’. As discussed above in Sect. 4, Lilian escaped FGM and therefore has been denied a voice in public spheres (Barazas are public meetings). As an interrelated part of this issue, she further articulates that ‘some cultures are considered so sacred and cannot be done away with so easily; Some community members are hostile and are resistant to change. It is hard to monitor girls during school holidays hence they can easily fall victims of FGM’. Lilian summarises the impact of the Network on her as follows: The golden chance of meeting magnificent phenomenal personnel and listening to the stories of other great ladies and men during the conference not only broaden my perceptions and beliefs about gender issues but also made me so courageous and strong towards the fight for gender equality, promotion of girl child welfare and strengthened me to help fight against harmful traditional practices. I look forward for more insightful gatherings and conferences to help me expand my strengths and desires to fight for the girl child. I strongly believe that “good seeds will definitely grow”.

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Moving from individual influence to a broader, international level, the Network has established excellent working relationships with UN Women Africa and UN Women in Kenya. Letty Chiwara, UN Women Representative to Ethiopia, the Africa Union Commission and the Economic Commission for Africa, was a Keynote Speaker at the Eldoret Conference. Since then, Lumala has engaged in activist work by UN Women Kenya to validate the Situational Analysis Report for Kenya, ‘Women’s Land Rights and Tenure Security in the Context of the SDGs’. The report outlines issues surrounding land, its access, use and control by individuals and collectives, through a gendered lens to identify key challenges for measuring women’s rights to land and tenure security in Kenya’s national development framework. It further discusses the opportunities that existing national frameworks offer for the integration of gender equality in interventions in the land sector. The longer-term aims of the Network are to continue working with partners and members, using sociolinguistics and communication studies research to directly inform the advocacy and activism of NGOs and charities in local, national and international communities. This can further international development by empowering women and girls into leadership positions in different professions, including businesses and politics. The collection and analysis of narrative data on experiences of the professions and careers brings new empirical data into studies of gender and professional communication, as well as providing important, practically applicable material for advocacy and activist work. In the case of both chapter authors, this takes place alongside and is complementary to our academic work. We continue to expand the narrative corpus, collecting stories on the eight socio-cultural, economic and political research themes from different countries, developing understandings of how the sociolinguistics of narrative can be used as an effective vehicle to inspire and create role models in the professions. This enables a continued exploration of the complex roles of identity construction and socio-cultural contexts that affect professional communication and the career trajectories of women in global workplace settings.

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References Atanga, L., & Djimeli, A. (2015). Women in Politics and the Media: The Discursive Construction of Collaboration for Female Leadership in Cameroon. In J. Wilson & D. Boxer (Eds.), Discourse, Politics and Women as Global Leaders (pp. 169–193). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Atanga, L., Ellece, S., Litosseliti, L., & Sunderland, J. (2012). Gender and Language in Sub-Saharan African Contexts: Issues and Challenges. Gender and Language, 6(1), 1–20. Atanga, L., Ellece, S., Litosseliti, L., & Sunderland, J. (2013). Gender and Language in Sub-Saharan Africa: Tradition, Struggle and Change. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2010). Locating Identity in Language. In C. Llamas & D.  Watt (Eds.), Language and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. De Fina, A. (2006). Group Identity, Narrative and Self-representations. In A. de Fina, D. Schiffrin, & M. Bamberg (Eds.), Discourse and Identity (pp. 351–375). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Flowerdew, J. (2007). The Non-Anglophone Scholar on the Periphery of Scholarly Publication. AILA Review, 20, 14–27. Goheen, M. (1996). Men Own the Fields, Women Own the Crops: Gender and Power in the Cameroon Grassfields. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Holmes, J. (2006). Gendered Talk at Work. Oxford: Blackwell. Jones, L. (2015). Ellen Johnson Sirleaf: Media’s “Ma Ellen” or the “Iron Lady” of West Africa? Textual Discourse and Brand of Leader. In J.  Wilson & D. Boxer (Eds.), Discourse, Politics and Women as Global Leaders (pp. 315–343). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Kammoun, R. (2015). Gender and Political Discourse in Tunisia. In J. Wilson & D.  Boxer (Eds.), Discourse, Politics and Women as Global Leaders (pp. 121–148). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Kristof, N., & Wudunn, S. (2010). Half the Sky: How to Change the World. London: Virago. Labov, W. (1972). Language in the Inner City. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, W. (2013). The Language of Life and Death: The Transformation of Experience in Oral Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McElhinny, B. (Ed.). (2011). Words, Worlds and Material Girls. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Mills, S., & Mullany, L. (2011). Language, Gender and Feminism: Theory, Methodology and Practice. Oxon: Routledge. Mullany, L. (2006). Narrative Constructions of Gender and Professional Identities. In T. Omoniyi & G. White (Eds.), The Sociolinguistics of Identity (pp. 157–172). London: Continuum. Mullany, L. (2010). Gendered Identities in the Professional Workplace: Negotiating the Glass Ceiling. In C. Llamas & D. Watt (Eds.), Language and Identities (pp. 179–191). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mullany, L. (forthcoming, 2021). Sociolinguistic Awareness in Business Professionals. In E.  Darics (Ed.), Language Awareness in Business and Professional Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mullany, L., & Yoong, M. (2016). Language, Gender and Political Life: A Case Study from Malaysia. In S.  Preece (Ed.), Handbook of Applied Linguistics (pp. 824–845). Oxon: Routledge. Norrick, N. (2013). Narratives of Vicarious Experience in Conversation. Language in Society, 42(4), 385–406. Schiff, B., & Noy, C. (2006). Making It Personal: Sharing Meanings in the Narratives of Holocuast Survivors. In A. de Fina, D. Schiffrin, & M. Bamberg (Eds.), Discourse and Identity (pp.  398–425). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schiffrin, D. (1996). Narrative as Self-Portrait: Sociolinguistic Constructions of Identity. Language in Society, 25(2), 167–203. World Economic Forum, (2020). Global Gender Gap Report. World Economic Forum. [Online] Accessed 20th March 2020. http://www3.weforum.org/ docs/WEF_GGGR_2020.pdf UN (2016).  The Sustainable Development Goals Report. New  York: United Nations. [Online] Accessed 14 April 2017. https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/ report/2016/The%20Sustainable%20Development%20Goals%20 Report%202016.pdf UN Women, (2014). Gender Equality and Sustainable Development. World Survey on the Role of Women in Development. New  York: UN Women. [Online] Accessed 16th April 2018. https://www.unwomen.org/-/media/ headquarters/attachments/sections/library/publications/2014/world-surveyon-the-role-of-women-in-development-2014-en.pdf UN Women. (2018). Facts and Figures: Leadership and Political Participation. New  York: United Nations. [Online] Accessed 15th April 2019. https:// www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/leadership-and-political-participation/ facts-and-figures

5 Culture Change and Rebranding in the Charity Sector: A Linguistic Consultancy Approach Veronika Koller and Gill Ereaut

1

Introduction

This chapter reports on the rebranding of a British cancer charity, a process involving an external rejuvenation closely associated with wider internal culture change. Management of the charity had become aware that it was not maximising its potential reach and effect, especially that it was not reaching important socio-demographic groups of cancer patients. To address these issues, it sought to adjust both the organisation’s brand identity and its internal culture in parallel, based upon an analysis of its existing culture. That work used forms of discourse analysis as a major analytic tool. The client’s application of this research and consulting work

V. Koller (*) Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK e-mail: [email protected] G. Ereaut Linguistic Landscapes, Reigate, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 L. Mullany (ed.), Professional Communication, Communicating in Professions and Organizations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41668-3_5

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was wide-ranging, but this chapter will focus on the linguistic rebranding aspect first and foremost. Prostate Cancer UK (PCUK), formerly known as The Prostate Cancer Charity (TPCC), was founded in 1996. The organisation’s remit is to improve the care and welfare of those affected by prostate cancer by increasing investment in research, by raising public and political awareness of the disease, and by providing information and specialist helpline services to those affected. In the view of many involved, prostate cancer has long been neglected, especially in comparison to the attention and activism promoted by breast cancer charities (King 2006). During 2011, two developments led to the work described in this chapter. The charity appointed a new Chief Executive and its first ever Director of Communications, and significant new sources of funding became available. This meant the charity had the means to be far more ambitious than previously, and also felt a strong obligation to use these funds effectively. At that time, the charity was not well known and needed a higher public profile. It especially needed to reach and engage more working-class men, men outside the South East of England, and African Caribbean men—the last group being at higher risk of developing prostate cancer than other men in the UK. Management felt that neither the organisation nor the brand was maximising its assets, so there was opportunity and urgent need for the organisation to examine itself and the way it presented itself to the world. Being aware that a major brand review is a significant undertaking with far-reaching consequences, the charity opened itself up to outside analysis and expertise. As part of this, the charity commissioned Linguistic Landscapes Ltd, a British consulting company; this company (LL) routinely works with several specialist associates, including academic linguists like VK, combining skills in linguistic analysis with those in organisational and change consulting to address a range of organisational issues in an effective and evidence-based way. The consulting project reported here was designed to help leadership and staff understand how they might change not just the external brand, but the organisation itself, in order to move forward to meet their strategic goals. However, the first step in this endeavour was analytic, namely to ascertain the status quo of

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internal and external discourses constructing the organisation and the brand, and to reflect these back to leadership and staff. The design for the project involved the sampling, collection and analysis of the language used inside TPCC; this included formal and informal texts, and both written and spoken language. It also included analysis of various samples of externally facing communications, including fundraising communications, policy statements, press releases, information leaflets, webpages and so on. Analysis focused around a relatively simple question: what appeared to be the unspoken assumptions underpinning the observable language? Especially, how did the charity construct the following: • • • •

itself its audiences and stakeholders its own relationship with such stakeholders the disease itself

The patterns and interpretations derived were used as a proxy for what is often known as organisational culture, defined as the learned general rules that shape how people think, behave and make decisions at work, day to day, but which may not be fully conscious. These matter because they have implications for the way a brand presents itself and is perceived, in short, its brand identity. The picture of the organisational culture that emerged from the analysis was shared widely within the charity and tested for resonance with those involved. Importantly, the consequences of this picture for its ambition at the time were also debated. With a clearer view of ‘how we do things round here’, the charity assessed what would help them and what would not. It then embarked on an ambitious programme of work to radically rethink and relaunch the brand from the inside out. In this chapter, we briefly review previous work and introduce our own approach, including data and methods. We present the rebranding process in Sect. 4, where we detail the brand identity we ascertained when we started working for TPCC, introduce PCUK’s new brand identity, detail the working principles we developed to help change the brand and give examples of how the organisation successfully applied those principles.

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We close with a discussion of the consultancy’s impact on the client, what made the engagement successful and how the long-term relationship with the client unfolded.

2

Charity Branding

The present chapter is one of only very few published studies on the language aspects of rebranding a charity. Branding can be defined as a set of ‘discursive processes … [t]he purpose of [which] is social action, to persuade people to buy the product or service represented by the brand’ (Flowerdew 2004: 585). Other linguistic work includes language and visual elements in the branding of HSBC (Koller 2007), corporate branding in mission statements (Koller 2008), image schemas in brand names and car logos (Pérez Hernández 2013) and the brand identity of the innocent company online (The PAD Research Group 2016). From the charity sector, Vestergaard (2008) looks at verbal, visual and audio aspects of charity branding in an Amnesty International TV advertisement. Her linguistic analysis demonstrates how a humanitarian organisation problematises mediated communication and seeks to overcome apathy and perceived powerlessness on the part of the general public. The complex mission of charities, for example, supporting people, funding research and raising awareness, can translate into brands that are notably more complex than the brand identities of consumer goods or even for-profit corporate brands. The differentiated masculinity of Prostate Cancer UK’s brand personality illustrates this notion (see Sect. 4). These previous works were all conducted from an outside perspective, with researchers collecting publicly available data instead of working with organisations as consultants on a specific brief. To the best of our knowledge, the only published work reporting on language consultancy is Waller and Delin’s (2003) piece on using the invoices of utility companies as opportunities to project a cooperative brand personality. The dearth of published consultancy-based studies is of course not surprising, given that such work is subject to confidentiality in order to guard the client’s interests. It is also no coincidence that we are here presenting a successful engagement that forms part of a long-term relationship

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between consultants, researchers and client organisation. Given the paucity of published consulting work, it is important to outline our discourse approach to rebranding and organisational change more widely. A brand is strongest when its internal and external discourses converge (Balmer 2001; Urde 2003) and when its central values are reflected in both texts and discursive practices. In our consulting work, we routinely go beyond a focus on either internal or external discourse, but provide an integrated view of an organisation’s textual products and practices (Fig. 5.1). Thinking about flows of discourse and their effects allows us to connect issues that are often treated as separate, and opens up new ways to act. In our consulting experience, the common distinction between internal language (often dismissed as ‘jargon’) and external communications is unhelpful, especially for service organisations. If one considers internal language instead as discourse, it becomes clear that it potentially holds in place certain powerful assumptions, especially about customers or other external stakeholders. These assumptions ‘flow’, that is, unspoken constructions of customers and customer relationships find their way subtly into many areas. Internal constructions leak or find their way easily into

Fig. 5.1  Flows of discourse (Ereaut 2012)

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relatively uncontrolled areas like face-to-face interactions, answers to complaints or enquiries. However, ‘controlled’ communications designed by external agencies also become influenced by internal discourse: agencies may get so close to clients they start to think and talk like them, and even if they do not, they may find it hard to get senior sign-off for ideas that do not fit existing powerful but unacknowledged norms. This means that, in order to create branding that is capable of being sustained through all activities and contacts with customers or stakeholders, internal and external texts and practices must be considered together.

3

Data and Methods

The data analysed for the first stage of the project comprises of three sets: • Approx. 100 internal documents, such as minutes of meetings, internal presentations and reports, staff induction documents, internal email and wall notices, all of which we treated as ‘backstage’ data (cf. Goffman 1959). • Around 50 examples of external communications, or ‘frontstage’ data, for example, leaflets, brochures, website content and supporter newsletters. • Interviews and conversations and observed meetings, totalling 30 sets of backstage data that provided information about processes at the organisation. For comparison, the team also analysed six threads from two different discussion fora for men with prostate cancer run by TPCC. In this chapter, the main focus is on the charity’s internal language and its external communications. The project was carried out by a small team comprising three academic discourse analysts, with a range of theoretical orientations, working as associates alongside two consultants at LL whose primary skills are in organisational change and branding. The analysis combined theory-­ driven parameters with those emergent from the data. Theory-driven parameters included social actor representation, transitivity and

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metaphor, while politeness features and interdiscursivity emerged as relevant. We investigated the linguistic and visual features of both internal/ backstage and external/frontstage discourse, and additionally looked at the discursive practices and processes within the organisation.

4

Data Analysis

4.1

Identifying the Existing Brand: The Prostate Cancer Charity

Part of the brand-related consultancy presented in this chapter involved identifying the brand personality projected in the charity’s existing materials. In particular, we were interested in how TPCC used language and visuals to construct the charity itself and to position it vis-à-vis its main stakeholder group, thereby creating identities both for itself and for men with the disease. Our results showed that the way the charity constructed and responded both to the disease and its own activities represented what might be called a ‘muffled’ discourse: the effect of language use was to project a soft, quiet, civilised and caring organisation. There were occasional bursts of ‘fighting talk’, but those were submerged by the overriding impression of softness. Amongst several relevant findings, analysis of pragmatic features including hedging, lexico-grammatical transitivity and visuals showed that the organisation projected a classed and gendered brand personality that diverged from the groups of men they were trying to reach. The masculinity conveyed was very white British, middle-class and educated, and therefore less prototypical than, and, crucially, very different from, the working-class and African/African Caribbean men the organisation was trying to reach. In interviews, members of the organisation showed awareness that ‘we generally seem to appeal to this middle-class, white, wealthy, well-educated population’. Notably, too, men affected by prostate cancer were sidelined both linguistically and visually. In the organisation’s internal discourse, prostate cancer itself was constructed as an unrecognised danger. Thus, we found repeated use of mental processes combined with negation as in the following:

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(1) 9 out of 10 adults don’t know what the prostate gland does. (Key Messages 2011)

This hidden and mysterious nature of the disease was partly accounted for by neglect and disregard attributed to embarrassment: (2) Black men in particular … don’t want to talk about things like that. (testimonial, Annual Review 2009/10)

Lack of knowledge and investigation makes prostate cancer not only unknown but also uncertain, complex and contradictory. These characteristics were also expressed through negation of existential processes and through comparison: (3) There isn’t a simple answer to it, there isn’t a screening programme. Intervening and treating the disease can do as much harm as it can good. (interview)

Much of the neglect and ignorance may stem from the taboo around sexual organs. Paradoxically, TPCC lamented the effects of that taboo while simultaneously contributing to it, for example, by euphemistic metaphoric references to ‘water works trouble’ (poster). Sexual functions were likewise not referred to explicitly: (4) Two of the most vital functions in a man are impaired by his treatment. (interview)

Prostate cancer and its treatment lead to problems with erections and urination, perceived as emasculating and a threat to both men and any partners. TPCC’s internal discourse on its response to the disease was characterised by features of academic writing, such as lack of social actors, including nominalisation and utterance autonomisation (van Leeuwen 2008: 46):

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(5) The Charity’s research also suggests that many men do not receive the information they want and need on different treatment options. (internal document)

This style contributed to an educated brand personality. Whilst this may inspire trust in stakeholders, such language made the organisation come across as detached, impersonal and middle-class. There was occasional use of Violence metaphors and expressions of anger in both external and internal discourse: (6) Our mission: Fighting prostate cancer on every front—through research, support, information and campaigning. (wall sign)

Yet such ‘fighting talk’ was often qualified or replaced with reference to more restrained emotions. For example, a decision by the British National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), met with considerable anger internally, was discussed in different terms externally: (7) It is disappointing to see that NICE does not believe that cabazitaxel is a treatment it can recommend at this stage. (support group newsletter)

TPCC’s Key Messages 2011 asked staff to ‘avoid using “fighting” references in excess’. A construction of men with prostate cancer in terms of potentially empowering Violence metaphors (Semino et al. 2017; Semino and Demjén, this volume) was thus actively discouraged. While interviewees expressed sympathy and empathy for men living with prostate cancer, TPCC’s external discourse metaphorically and literally decentred them as only one node in a web of relations. If men were depicted in relationships, those were mostly heterosexual, and men were to be marginalised visually and linguistically next to their female partners: (8) Whilst the disease affects men physically, it has a devastating emotional and physical impact on their partners and families. (briefing for corporate fundraising)

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Here, men are ‘affected’, while the effect on partners and families is intensified as ‘devastating’. Decentring is also achieved syntactically, referring to men in a subordinate clause. The symbolic disempowerment of men was also encoded in grammar, specifically transitivity, where TPCC predominantly represented itself as engaging in material processes impacting on stakeholders, rarely if ever vice versa: (9) …to guide people through these complexities. (internal document)

On occasion, reference to ‘men’ was omitted altogether: (10) The Prostate Cancer Charity…provides support, information to people and their families affected by prostate cancer. (briefing document)

Supporters were the one stakeholder group to be represented as acting on TPCC. Stakeholders were also represented as acting on each other, but in this case, it was men who were acted upon, intensified by a Violence metaphor in the following: (11) On every front … women supported the men they care about. (annual review 2010/11)

The charity’s positioning and relating to stakeholders was also reflected in its discursive practices and processes: (12) Members receive a bulletin once a month, which outlines information about current opportunities to get involved and influence the Charity’s work. (support group newsletter)

Here, members ‘receive’ bulletins, support and care, which makes them grammatically active but semantically non-agentive (Darics and Koller 2019). Given that discursive processes are about who distributes and receives what kinds of texts and through what channels, we could think of these processes as a way in themselves of positioning and relating to stakeholders.

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Interviews with managers and employees identified frustration with the charity’s absence of assertive purpose and drive, often expressed in gendered terms: (13) To be very blunt, our charity lacks balls. (interview)

Arguably, it seems that the threat that prostate cancer poses to both biological maleness and cultural masculinity had become a hallmark of TPCC as well. At the very least, the middle-class, educated, paternal masculinity of its brand personality was not seen as being up to the task. In summary, TPCC’s internal and external discourse tended to disempower and decentre men, while constructing a polite and conservative masculinity for itself. It is also worth noting that the other main charity addressing prostate cancer at the time, Prostate Action, took a very different discursive and semiotic approach. Instead of TPCC’s pale blue, with its connotations of babyhood and the British National Health Service, Prostate Action’s brand colours were bright red combined with medium/dark blue; its logo featured a male sign. Prostate Action also adopted an unqualified use of Violence metaphors: ‘we fund research to beat prostate disease’. The effect was culturally unambiguously masculine. Although there were many factors and insights that led to the new brand identity adopted by TPCC, seeing the differences between their ‘muffled’ identity and that of other charities contributed to their decision to become visibly more bold and ‘masculine’.

4.2

Developing a New Brand

The initial findings found considerable resonance with senior leadership and members of TPCC at all levels. They recognised the picture of themselves that we showed them, but for the first time and with a degree of shock they recognised its significance in relation to their overt goals. The findings, and the power of their own response to them, also strengthened management’s resolve to undertake a complete overhaul of the external brand and to work towards changing their internal culture. The next step was to formulate a number of working principles to effect change and meet the organisation’s strategic goals. We created these

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as consultants, working closely with TPCC’s staff. Grouped around the organisation’s vision to create ‘a better future for men with prostate cancer’, the principles are shown in Fig. 5.2. Designed to bridge the gap between strategic principles and everyday business-as-usual, and to address specific issues that had emerged from the analysis, these principles work as guidelines, reminding text producers to move away from unhelpful unconscious habits. Their use in internal and external discourse is intended to reposition an organisation in relation to its main stakeholders and construct new identities for both. There were some structural changes going on at the time: TPCC merged with Prostate Action and the organisation was renamed Prostate Cancer UK. The new name avoided ‘charity’, a decision supported by our brief corpus analysis of the terms ‘charity’ and ‘charities’. Searches in the British English 2006 (BE06) corpus,1 with additional searches in the spoken part of the British National Corpus sampler (1.14 million words),

Fig. 5.2  PCUK’s working principles, first iteration 2011

 The BE06 corpus is available at Lancaster University and comprises around 1.15 million words of contemporary written British English from a variety of genres (academic, news, fiction). A collocation analysis was carried out based on occurrences three words to the left and right of the search words, with a minimum frequency of 3 and log likelihood as the measure of significance. The cut-­ off point was 10.83 for p