Bargiela Chiappini F. & S. Harris. Politeness at Work. Issues & Challenges (2006)

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges
FRANCESCA BARGIELA-CHIAPPINI and SANDRA HARRIS
Abstract In this article we will attempt to address some of the issues that arise in researching politeness in the workplace, especially, though not exclusively, in the context of multicultural and multilingual encounters. We propose to look at debates around the nature of politeness and their relevance for research in work settings and to discuss the contribution made to these debates by analyses of politeness in the workplace. Finally, we will discuss some of the methodological problems that field researchers will face when conducting research on the field, especially in intercultural work contexts. These will include, for example, issues such as the choice of methodology/ s, confidentiality, the nature of the involvement of the researcher, making use of multi-method approaches, the comparability of analytical categories across different languages and culture. Finally, we suggest, very briefly, some directions for further research. Keywords: politeness; workplace communication; face; research methodologies; cross-cultural communication; interculturality 1. Introduction The first question that presents itself when considering politeness in the workplace relates to the nature of politeness itself and its possible variations in settings where interpersonal behaviour is also affected by specific situational and institutional norms and practices. Indeed, in the social order that underpins work exchanges, we would assume politeness to be one of the complex sets of factors constantly at play in dyadic or multiparty encounters, whether face to face or mediated. Holmes and Stubbe (2003: 5) state that their analyses indicate that most workplace interactions provide evidence of mutual respect and concern for the feelings or face needs of others: i. e. of politeness. Arguably, respect, face
Journal of Politeness Research 2 (2006), 733 1612-5681/06/0020007 Walter de Gruyter
Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris
and feelings for others are very often central to a working definition of politeness, as even a cursory look at the extensive literature confirms. Much of this literature is focused on language, and it is not surprising that linguistics and pragmatics are two disciplines that have made a distinctive and substantial contribution to the understanding of politeness. Other disciplines, such as social psychology, anthropology and sociology, have also highlighted some of the factors that affect the linguistic expression of politeness, especially but not only, in intercultural encounters (e. g., Holtgraves and Yang 1990; Kwarciak 1993; Lim 1994). In this article we concentrate on research on linguistic politeness emanating from linguistics and pragmatics and will only attempt to refer to the contributions of other disciplines when necessary. Non-verbal behaviour cannot be considered here, though its importance for the study of politeness is clear, and it constitutes a field of study in itself. Methodologically, research on linguistic politeness in the past has often relied on elicited or simulated data but during the past decade or so, a number of scholars have turned their attention to naturally-occurring interactions. While this has been a fruitful development, it has also given rise to a host of new challenges for field researchers who have to deal with issues of access, legitimacy, confidentiality and ethics in order to work alongside their institutional or business counterparts. The research scenario is further complicated in intercultural or crosscultural analyses where linguistic and cultural sensitivity is also crucial. For example, the comparability of analytical categories across diverse cultures as well as the use of concepts developed by Western psychology or sociology are two of the issues that researchers need to address when they become involved in international collaborative programmes or simply when they find themselves working across cultural borders. It is probably useful to clarify initially what we mean by inter-cultural and cross-cultural, as these terms are often used interchangeably. Consistent with earlier work (Bargiela-Chiappini and Nickerson 2003; BargielaChiappini 2004), we adopt the definitions of Gudykunst (2002: 175 176), whereby cross-cultural refers to comparisons of different cultures in situations of non-contact and inter-cultural to comparisons of cultures in contact. (Intracultural describes behaviour within a culture.) Finally, though the term workplace has come recently to signify a very broadly based concept, our focus in this article will be primarily on business, managerial and corporate settings, largely for reasons of space and the thematic emphasis of the current issue. 2. Background In her entry on Politeness for the International Encyclopedia for Social and Behavioral Sciences, Penelope Brown (2001) defines politeness as
referring to verbal and nonverbal concerns for social persona or face, expressed linguistically through deviations from the efficient exchange of information predicated in Grices Cooperative Principle (CP). Taking another look at Grices (1975) work, we note that he concedes that in addition to his well-known Four Maxims, there are all sorts of other maxims (aesthetic, social, or moral in character) such as Be Polite, which are also normally observed by participants in talk exchanges (cited in Kingwell 1993: 390). Indeed, politeness theory has come a long way from Grices view of it as a deviation from an ideal norm of communicative efficiency and mainly related to conversational implicature. In particular, recent theoretical discussions on the nature of politeness (e. g., Eelen 2001; Mills 2003; Watts 2003; Locher 2004) fully recognize its complexity as a study in its own right and as a crucial aspect of interactional pragmatics. Moreover, it has become much more generally accepted that politeness and the social and moral order are intermeshed in ways which go beyond face. For this reason alone, studying politeness is an enterprise that deserves not only renewed vigour and commitment but also a multidisciplinary approach. The study of politeness in the corporate workplace dates back to the analyses of written texts such as business and administrative correspondence in English, where the focus was on lexico-grammatical features accomplishing specific politeness strategies (e. g., Maier 1992, BargielaChiappini and Harris 1996, Graham and David 1996; Pilegaard 1997; Nickerson 1999; Mackiewicz and Riley 2003). More recently, data in other languages has been analyzed, sometimes from a contrastive perspective (e. g., Yeung 1997; Kong 1998a, 2005 forthcoming; McLaren 2001; Zhu 2001; Vergaro 2002), while historical linguists have contributed research on forms of polite expression in centuries-old business texts (Becker 2002; Tiisala 2004). More recently, the literature on politeness has begun to reflect the growing interest in spoken interaction in institutional, professional and corporate settings. See, for example, research on politeness strategies in service encounters (Lambert 1996, Kong 1998b; Pan 2000b; Norris and Rowsell 2003; Placencia 2004; Kaur 2005); in institutional settings (e. g., Roberts 1992; Hummert and Mazlof 2001; Jameson 2003; Ostermann 2003; Delbene 2004); in bicultural and multicultural workplaces (Clyne et al. 1991; Clyne 1994; Miller 1994); and in mediated workplace communication (e. g., McEnery et al. 2002; Morand and Ocker 2002; Hobbs 2003). The study of politeness in business negotiations, in particular, has attracted the attention of scholars intent on applying findings from cross-cultural and intercultural analyses to the improvement of teaching and training materials (e. g., Marriott 1990 and 1995; van der Wijst and Ulijn 1995; le Pair 1999). Business meetings have also proved a fruitful
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generic type of discourse (e. g., Yamada 1992; Miller 1994; Pan 2000a). However, reservations on the use of discrete categories, such as Brown and Levinsons (1987) positive and negative politeness strategies, for the analysis of multicultural meetings have been expressed. For example, Poncini found that one utterance could conceivably fall into a number of strategy categories, making the use of this [politeness] framework problematic (Poncini 2004: 64). At this point it is worth noting another group of scholars who have taken a different approach to issues of face and politeness in meetings, i. e., rapport management where politeness is one of a number of interactional domains. The underlying concern here is the relational work that informs business interactions (e. g., Miller 1995). Defining rapport management as her central concern, Spencer-Oatey (2000) outlines the its salient principles, which she then applies to Chinese-British meetings (Spencer-Oatey 2002; Spencer-Oatey and Xing 2003). Planken (2003, 2005) uses the same framework in her analyses of negotiations. The work of Xing (2002) on relational management is also inspired by this approach, whereas Bilbow (1997a, 1997b) employs the concept of impression management in his analyses of multicultural business meetings in Hong Kong. The importance of the relational aspect of workplace discourse applies also to certain other approaches, such as genre theory. For example, in a recent analysis of office conversations, small talk frequently constitutes the opening and closing phases of task-oriented encounters, and even talk that is primarily transactional reveals concerns and features which are essentially of a relational nature (Koester 2004). An important development in research concerned with politeness at work is the publication of Holmes and Stubbe (2003), Power and Politeness in the Workplace, based on data collected in New Zealand in conjunction with the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project. Settings include factories, government departments, small businesses and corporate organizations. Although the project as a whole is oriented towards identifying effective communication and primarily aimed at a readership of workplace practitioners, Holmes and Stubbe (2003) emphasize and explore the relationship between politeness and power and how both are instantiated in a range of discourse settings in the workplace. Drawing on more than one theoretical/methodological model (mainly critical discourse analysis, politeness theory and ethnography), the authors put forward a multidimensional analysis of workplace interaction which covers a range of topics and genres, i. e., meetings, requests/directives, small talk, humour, negotiation, miscommunication. Perhaps their most important conclusion for a readership concerned with politeness research is that the discourse strategies which characterize a particular interaction express not only the specific goals of the
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interaction and the relative roles of each participant in relation to those goals; they also actively construct the particular relationships between the people involved, in terms of social distance or solidarity the politeness norms as well as the participants relative power in the organization (Holmes and Stubbe 2003: 178). Holmes and Stubbe are only very marginally concerned with inter-cultural interaction, i. e., a brief section on a Maori/Pakeha exchange. Also of interest is the recent work of Louise Mullany (2003, 2004a, 2004b), who investigated how both male and female managers construct (and perform) their roles and identities in business meetings. She too collected a substantial amount of recorded data in the process of completing two ethnographic case studies, one based in a retail company and one in a manufacturing company, both in the UK. Her work is supplemented by personal observation and a number of interviews with those who participated in the meetings. Although Mullanys main focus is on gender, her work inevitably leads her to a concern with both power and politeness and their relationship in work settings. Mullany also deals with the role of humour and small talk and how these make a significant contribution to the construction of both gender and corporate identities. All the research previously cited is based on recorded natural language data. This is a significant development, which suggests that the use of simulated discourse and questionnaires as primary data is no longer a dominant methodology in the study of politeness in the workplace (e. g., Morand 1996; Rogers and Lee-Wong 2003), a trend that demands a fresh engagement with issues of research design. Moreover, the growing interest in inter-cultural and cross-cultural analysis adds a further set of challenges pertaining to the uncritical transfer of Western concepts and categories to other cultures and languages. We deal with both these concerns in the next three sections. 3. Conceptual challenges We began this article by noting that perhaps the most pressing issue in politeness research and one that has exercised two generations of scholars in the social sciences and humanities remains the question of the nature of politeness phenomena. There is undoubtedly a growing consensus that the view of politeness as an embellishment of social interaction is at best na ve, not least because it consequently tends to define behaviour that does not conform to expectations as impolite or rude. The juxtaposition of (degrees of) polite versus (degrees of) impolite behaviour is clearly an oversimplification. The fact that the ethics of politeness would seem to explain some important features of human interaction while excluding others as non-relevant, or, at least, as not
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easily amenable to inclusion, represents an unsatisfactory state of affairs. As suggested previously, recent researchers on politeness (Eelen 2001; Holmes and Stubbe 2003; Mills 2003; Watts 2003), despite their considerable differences, would all contend that politeness is most productively analyzed not as a system or a normative set of prescripts but as a social practice which is both dynamic and interactive, with variability seen as a positive component that builds into human communication a capacity for social and cultural negotiation and change. Thus the extent to which politeness is normative has recently become a controversial issue (see Eelen 2001: 121187 for a recent discussion of normativity in relationship to politeness theory). In Eelens view, politeness should be seen as a significant part of the process of the construction of social reality, whose main tenets are argumentativity, evaluation and discursiveness (Eelen 2001: 247). In this process, for Eelen, notions such as norms are best regarded as representations rather than realities, as arguments instead of givens (Eelen 2001: 247). However, Eelen goes on to argue that a theory of politeness should first and foremost be an examination of politeness1, (the everyday and common sense phenomenon of politeness) by means of politeness2 (its scientific conceptualization). Even if we largely accept Eelens version of politeness as primarily constructionist, dynamic and negotiated (as we do), it is possible to argue that the common sense view of politeness (politeness1) still largely perceives politeness as a set of norms and values that crucially influences the volitional and strategic action of individuals along with the belief that politeness reflects in verbal and nonverbal behaviour something of the deep-seated values of individual cultures. When we interact, therefore, we do politeness and much of the time engage in it, in large measure, unconsciously unless we are faced with new situations or groups, the norms/values of which we do not know; at this point we enter the high-risk zone of potentially impolite or rude behaviour which is unintended. Most of us can recognize that a mismatch between cultural values and expectations can cause misunderstanding or even conflict in intercultural contact situations; a substantial literature exists on this subject that also looks at the politeness heuristics of face and face-work in order to explain what may go wrong when conflicting wants come to the fore (e. g., Ting-Toomey and Kurogi 1998; Ting-Toomey and Oetzel 2001). This is not to suggest that cultures are homogeneous; sub-cultures and other groupings can also generate differing evaluations and interpretations of what is polite, or probably more important, impolite behaviour. Nor are we suggesting that politeness is identical with certain linguistic features in particular languages. However, inter-cultural encounters may still be, arguably, the ideal settings to explore some of the
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dynamics of politeness; cross-cultural research is also useful in that it provides insights from within individual cultures that can inform intercultural research projects. A serious difficulty with comparative research across cultures is that too often categories and constructs that were developed within a specific cultural domain and therefore embody the philosophical and value systems of that domain are uncritically transferred to culturally distant environments. Without a process of translation that clarifies the potentially different understandings of the terminology and its conceptual and value import, field researchers will soon find that their questionnaires or analytical frameworks become unworkable. This can be a problem even across apparently similar cultures, e. g., within Western Europe. For example, in their field work in Italy, Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris (1997) found that a questionnaire developed and tested within the British context caused a series of misunderstandings in the Italian context where apparently uncontroversial terms such as managers and management evoked quite different semantic connotations. While we look forward to more indigenous contributions to the literature on non-Western communication (e. g., Kim 2002), it may be useful to consider some of the challenges confronting field researchers engaged in cross-cultural and intercultural research and using concepts involving face and politeness as their analytical categories. It seems to us that there are at least two sets of distinct but related issues that require critical engagement: one conceptual and the other methodological in nature. Of all the problematic concepts that cross/inter-cultural researchers wrestle with, the most intractable must be culture. Is culture a cognitive notion or a socially-constructed one? Do people behave like English, or Chinese or Maori after internalizing cognitive patterns on which their behaviour is modelled in inter-cultural encounters, or do they realize cultural patterns through social interaction, elaborating intricate relational webs in real time? Or are these two versions of culture not actually alternative concepts to one another, as they are often presented, but complementary? What is the role, if indeed one is possible, for pre-defined sociolinguistic categories such as gender, class and race in the construction of culture(s)? How do we approach cultural heterogeneity? In some earlier work (Bargiela-Chiappini and Nickerson 2003; Bargiela-Chiappini 2004), we looked for intimations of new approaches to culture in disciplines such as psychology, anthropology and organization studies and found, quite unsurprisingly, that the pattern is one of variation, rather than convergence, of perspectives. For example, linguistic anthropology conflates language and culture in its understanding of language as culture (Duranti 2003, added emphasis). Organization studies tend to look at culture(s) as a micro-phenomenon located within
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the organization (Parkin 2000) in contrast with the established tradition in cross-cultural management that still operates with the problematic concept of national cultures (e. g., Hofstede 2001; but see McSweeney 2002 for a critical appraisal). It is perhaps from within cultural and cross-cultural research that the most fruitful challenges to (Western) analytical categories arise. Indigenous perspectives have emerged that question the reductionism of Western cognitive thinking and its preference for Cartesian dichotomies (Jing and Fu 2001; Matsumoto 2001; Oyama et al. 2001; Shi-xu 2002). Much Eastern philosophy, instead, seems to prefer to encompass, if not reconcile, dialectically coexisting opposites (Singelis 2000). In cross-cultural psychology, defining the relationship between culture and behaviour remains the major theoretical and methodological issue (Kagitcibasi and Poortinga 2000). Here relativistic and universalistic positions clash: the former emphasizes the uniqueness of phenomena and the context dependency of meaning and interpretation; the latter concentrates on what is common and can be compared. Rather than underscoring the contrast between these two perspectives, their complementarity could be exploited by identifying both emic (indigenous) and etic (universal) aspects of behaviour. Attention to cultural commonality as well as to cultural difference should be encouraged (Kagitcibasi and Poortinga 2000) in an attempt to capture phenomena that straddle the etic and the emic or have different manifestations in the two dimensions. Face and politeness are two such phenomena. This is not the place for a review of the large Anglo-Saxon literature on politeness research and its burgeoning critique (for a selective overview of the critical literature on face see Bargiela-Chiappini 2003). Instead, we would like briefly to outline the original contribution of Erving Goffman to an understanding of politeness, though Goffman himself is interested primarily in constructing a theory of social interaction, not politeness. However, in the light of the canonical status accorded to the work of Brown and Levinson until fairly recently, and the fact that they draw upon Goffman in important and acknowledged ways, we feel that his distinctive contribution to the analysis of face needs recovering from the more reductionist interpretation of Brown and Levinson. In the early 1990s, Watts et al. (1992: 6) observed that studying politeness meant engaging with the social order and the sociocultural conventions which dictate appropriate modes of behaviour. The literature on linguistic politeness, including Brown and Levinsons work, has sometimes overlooked the social-embeddedness of polite behaviour, which has implications for cross-cultural research. The consequences of revisiting politeness as, firstly, the dynamic locus of enabling
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and constraining functions regulating social behaviour, which is therefore best understood within a moral framework of rights and duties (Werkhofer 1992) are far reaching. Eelen (2001:170), significantly, argues that, among other things, politeness is an inherently ethical phenomenon. Over thirty years ago, in his sociological writings, Goffman elaborated his notions of face, face-work and face-saving practices against the background of a complex and problematic understanding of the interactional mile Durkheim and his order. Influenced by the French sociologist E work on the religious origins and nature of social activities, in particular The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915), Goffman understood social morality as located in social solidarity. In his early ritual metaphor of society the moral and religious became fused. Although Goffmans social actor is strongly individualistic, a reflection of the Anglo-Saxon values of independence and privacy, his concerns are never exclusively egocentric. The interdependence dimension of social beings is emphasized in the attention that Goffman pays to the values of deference, demeanour and tact. Since Goffmans interest is mainly in developing a theory of social interaction, he does not see face-maintenance as the objective of the interaction but rather as a condition of it. Therefore, when he writes about face-saving practices Goffman is in fact concerned with mapping the traffic rules of social interactions (Goffman 1967: 12). In his understanding, acting consistently with face is equivalent to accomplishing face-work, a notion that includes verbal and nonverbal behaviour in mediated or direct encounters. The ritually delicate object that is Goffmans ideal social actor protects self and face through avoidance processes, corrective processes and aggressive use of face-work (Goffman 1967: 1314), all actions that aim at self-preservation. Later on in the same essay, however, Goffman also writes about tact, reciprocal self-denial, and negative bargaining (bending to accommodate other interactants), actions that show other-awareness and concern for the ritual equilibrium. When there is conflict, embarrassment ensues, which Goffman considers almost as a social illness to be contained (Goffman 1967: 106). In his analysis of conflict arising from contrasting organizational principles, he is prepared to see individuals sacrifice their own identities and the encounter, too, in order to preserve the social order. Face is thus lost through personal embarrassment, but the social structure is maintained; in fact it gains in elasticity (Goffman 1967: 112). Ultimately, then, even for the individualistic Western self there appears to be the embarrassing prospect of losing face and submitting to the shame of interactional breakdown, seemingly in response to a moral imperative that calls for the safeguard of the social order. In Goffmans
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work, politeness is revealed as one of the fundamental principles governing the delicate equilibrium of the social order, constantly threatened by the unforeseeable dynamics of social interaction. Goffmans notion of dissonance refers to verbal or nonverbal acts that go against the systems of rules, conventions, expectations that govern appropriate social behaviour. In a recent lecture given at the launch of The Journal of Politeness Research, Robert Arundale (2005), building critically on Goffmans work, put forward an alternative view of face (to Brown and Levinsons) as relational and interactional in the following terms, offering a particular challenge: In developing an alternative and more culture-general conceptualization of face for a new theory of face-work, I have drawn on an observation considerably more general than Goffmans. Namely, that all humans engage in face-to-face interaction within a matrix of relationships with other human beings. From the perspective of human communication, interaction in relationships appears basic to explaining human sociality. Given this particular observational and theoretical framing, one needs to ask if the alternative view of face as interactional and relational is a culturally bounded conceptualization? Of course it is. No human construction can be otherwise More culture-general conceptualizations are possible, however, so long as they are derived in dialectical interplay with culturespecific instantiations Therein lies the challenge for new conceptualizations of face. The fact that face and politeness seem interwoven in the fabric of social life and may in fact form its very canvas and that the prospect of the demise of civil discourse (Kingwell, 1993: 404) could lead to the possible collapse of (many levels of) the interactional equilibrium would seem to provide support for the thesis of the universality of politeness. While it is indefensible to suggest that the patterns of use of certain linguistic forms make one society intrinsically more polite than another, it is probably fair to assume that all societies have some version of norms that define polite behaviour; in this sense, politeness is universal, although the norms underlying it may vary and may be open to dispute in different contexts (Meier 1995). Indeed, these norms are almost certainly difficult to identify with any degree of precision and may well be related to communities of practice, especially within complex cultures and societies. The concept of communities of practice derives from Wengers (1998) work where he characterizes communities of practice primarily as a group of people who have been engaged in a common set of tasks over a period of time and, hence, experience a sense of mutual
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engagement, a joint enterprise and a shared repertoire (Wenger 1998: 73), which includes sets of discourse practices as well as shared histories of learning (Wenger 1998: 103). Wengers ethnographic fieldwork for the book was undertaken in a workplace setting, i. e., a medical claims producing centre operated by a large American insurance company. Since the book was published, the concept of communities of practice has been extended and modified considerably (particularly in relationship to gender), and Mills (2003:195197) provides an insightful and comprehensive discussion of this work. The notion of communities of practice has seldom been associated with cross-cultural analyses, although we shall refer again later to researchers who seem implicitly to be working towards a similar concept. Cross-cultural analyses of politeness probably need to develop, first of all, emic notions of polite behaviour which in turn must be carefully considered in terms of comparability before they are deemed to be useful for field research. The preference for isolated speech acts should be replaced by (or at least embedded in) the analysis of exchanges clearly located in the arena of social interaction (Meier 1995) where goals, interests, ends, motivations are played out. The workplace, in particular, comprises a substratum of deep-rooted beliefs and conceptualizations about the world and human relations that are drawn upon by the interactants. Awareness of the invisible layers of cultural meanings constructing the broader context of business interactions is crucial to avoid imposing arbitrary etic interpretations. A study of business relations in Taiwan (Chang and Holt 1996) demonstrates how interpersonal relationships are built through emotional work as a means for achieving the instrumental goals of the interaction. On the other hand, by looking at linguistic exchanges only in inter/cross-cultural analyses we run the risk of missing the bigger picture which is the key to a fuller interpretation. More emic research is needed, especially in non-Anglophone societies, which integrates cultural beliefs and norms as part of the linguists interpretative toolkit. In work and organizational settings, local normative and belief systems are often operational and emanate from the history of the firm or the company, and these give rise to a distinctive community of practice which provides a further crucial dimension for analysis. 4. Methodologies: The collection and analysis of data Work environments present specific challenges to researchers: issues of access, confidentiality, feedback expectations, time and relationship management may affect the formulation of the analytical framework and the choice of methods for data collection. For example, a qualitative
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study of corporate interaction that relies on non-participant observation and recordings will need formal approval at the highest levels within the organization, which cannot be taken for granted. Although longitudinal studies are always preferable to ad-hoc visits to the workplace, the resources invested in creating and maintaining relations with partners in companies and other workplace settings cannot be underestimated. Field researchers wishing to observe and analyze the manifestations of politeness in the workplace can choose from a range of methodologies. Researcher choice depends on several factors such as: the inclination of the researcher in terms of his or her ontological and epistemological assumptions; the specific object of the research; the terms of access to and residence in the field negotiated by the researcher; the nature of the interactions being observed and/or recorded. Issues of sensitivity and confidentiality can impose serious constraints on methodological choices. For instance, action research that is, qualitative, participative methodologies which pursue research and change at the same time would not be either feasible or appropriate in analyzing boardroom meetings, unless the researcher also happened to be acting as a consultant for the company. Where a high degree of involvement is possible, and advisable, hermeneutics, participative ethnography and action research guarantee the closest possible contact with interactants and their workplace activities through full immersion and a high degree of involvement in the work context. These methodologies rely on the experiential openness of the researcher to learning from and in the field. Bargiela-Chiappini and Nickerson (2003:7) suggest critical hermeneutics as an analytic approach to intercultural business communication. The attractiveness of hermeneutics (defined by the OED as the art or science of interpretation) sees interaction as a dialogic relationship embedded in a historical tradition (Roy and Starosta 2001). One of the best known figures in the hermeneutic tradition, the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer1 in his opus Truth and Method discusses the central importance of language (as discourse) in the hermeneutical experience. The development of a common language is instrumental to conversation as a process of two people understanding each other it is characteristic of every true conversation that each opens himself to the other person, truly accepts his point of view as worthy of consideration and gets inside the other to such an extent that he understands not a particular individual, but what he says (Gadamer 1975: 347). The understanding that is implied here goes beyond representation or even re-presentation. It is not a private, interior activity between a text and its interpreter. It is a practical-moral activity that is dependent on the self and on selfexamination (Schwandt 1999). The dialogue with the Other from an
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unfamiliar culture, be it a geographically-remote culture or simply a different professional culture (viz. corporate or institutional management), also poses challenging ontological and epistemological questions for the analysis of intercultural business discourse. In participative or participant ethnography the tension between reflexivity and positivism is negotiated in the methodological duality of a reflexive science, which elevates dialogue as its defining principle and intersubjectivity between participant and observer as its premise (Burawoy 1998: 14). As a consequence of participation-intervention, power relations are problematized: domination, silencing, objectification and normalization are the power effects identified by Burawoy as emerging from his extended case-study of the Zambian copper industry in the 1970s. Burawoy argues that the ethnographer cannot avoid dominating and being dominated and is often engaged in power struggles with people in the field: the existing dominant ideologies marginalize discordant voices; social forces will tend to be treated as external and natural; complex situations are made to fit into categories that can be investigated (Burawoy 1998: 234). All these issues are inherent in organizational ethnography where the researchers are engaged in a constant process of subtle re-negotiation of their own identity and position in the field as the research progresses (Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris 1997). The personal involvement of the researcher with the object of the research is one of the criteria that identifies hermeneutical research and is also the source of criticism of subjectivity and lack of rigour. Immersion in the field and high degree of involvement often characterizes the work of the organizational ethnographer, especially if she is a participant observer (Cameron et al. 1992; Watson 2000, 2001). Combined with action research, participative ethnography demands the researchers engagement on two, or sometimes even three, fronts (Reason and Torbert 2001). Reflexivity, or critical subjectivity is the distinctive feature of firstperson research: first-person downstream research/practice can involve critical examination of day-to-day behaviour, drawing on qualities of mindfulness and self-awareness to notice critically the impact of ones actions in the wider world (Reason and Torbert, 2001: 178). Co-operative inquiry is the best example of second-person research, where a group of between six and twenty co-researchers (and co-subjects) engage in cycles of action and reflection. Clearly, first- and second-person research tend to co-exist and in fact augment one another when researchers work collaboratively and are prepared to be challenged by findings and colleagues as the project unfolds. Finally, in third-person research, constituencies may become engaged in the inquiry who are not personally known to the researchers but whom the researchers may seek to empower (Reason and Torbert 2001: 234).
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The first two types of ethnographic methodologies, reflexive/critical subjective and cooperative enquiry, are suited to politeness researchers working both as individuals or in teams. Such methodologies assume patterns of collaborative research based on dialogue with the managers, professionals or other workers on site. In fact, in collaborative organizational research, the process of learning from the practitioners through reflexive dialoguing relies on the researchers learning the language of rtensson and Lee 2004). Dialogue as an open managerial praxis (Ma and heterogeneous interplay of multiple and polyphonic voices in continuous tension a struggle for understanding and for creating 2001: 127) captures some of the dynamism something new (Markova of the researcher-researched communication; the inherently antinomic nature of dialogue keeps the communication alive. Studies of organizational discourse tend to be dominated by theoretical approaches, even though communicative practices in business and institutions are central to their survival and inherently discourse-based. On this point, Heath et al. (2004: 354) observe that workplace studies powerfully demonstrate how the fine details of interaction lie at the heart of a broad range of organizational activities, and that discourse, talk and interaction are embedded in the material environment. What many of these studies are engaging in is essentially a community of practices approach, although this is usually implicit. As Wengers notion of communities of practice has been modified by Mills and others in order to enhance its relevance to gender studies, so the analysis of communicative practices in business and other organizations might be further enhanced through a more explicit development and application of Wengers insights. Closer to home, sociolinguists, anthropological linguists, conversation analysts and those working within pragmatics in their different ways accord varying degrees of pre-eminence to the role of language (or discourse) in their analyses. Setting aside for the moment the substantive epistemological differences that distinguish their respective methodologies, they all tend to perceive language as predominantly social action and to view its interactive enactment as the primary analytical focus for politeness research in the workplace. In an interesting comparison of five different approaches (conversation analysis, interactional analysis, discursive psychology, politeness theory, critical discourse analysis) to discourse analysis, Stubbe et al. (2003) convincingly illustrate some of the challenges facing multi-method research. Using an extract involving an encounter between a male senior public service manager and a less senior female policy analyst recorded for the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project previously referred to, Stubbe and colleagues highlight both the different theoretical assumptions underpinning the approaches and the implications of these for a qualitative analysis. Both
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commonalities and differences are highlighted, though politeness theory is illustrated by a largely uncritical version of Brown and Levinson (1987). Ideally, the resultant analysis would draw on the attention to conversational detail exemplified by conversation analysis and interaction analysis, the sensitivity to psychological and sociological variables that politeness theory and discursive psychology offer and the critical awareness and social engagement of critical discourse analysis, and, in fact, the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project does draw productively on a range of methodologies and modes of analysis. The multi-method approach that would be required to capture all these dimensions in a single analytical framework seems to call for bricolage research. This has been developed as a reaction to the strictures of reductionism, an invitation to learn a variety of ways of seeing and interpreting in the pursuit of knowledge (Kincheloe 2001: 682). At the other end of the methodological spectrum, we witness the ongoing debate on the dangers of subjective judgement in qualitative methodology. The practice of creating new analytical categories for data that do not seem to be explicable by existing categories has been criticized as a liberal attitude that goes against the precepts of scientific research (Clarke 2004: 42). However, it seems to us that a desirable multiperspectival approach to politeness research in the workplace can only flourish within multidisciplinary contact, where insights from cognate disciplines (and beyond) are exchanged dialectically. This process is bound to generate new crossdisciplinary interpretative categories that integrate or simply supersede discipline-specific ones. The issue of rigour arises here and not only in connection with methodologies: different ontological and epistemological assumptions characterize diverse disciplines that could conceivably contribute to politeness research in the workplace. The research bricoleurs of the future are reminded that knowledge is always in process, developing, culturally-specific, and power-inscribed (Kincheloe 2001: 689). 5. Cross- and inter-cultural research in politeness Cross-cultural politeness research often calls into question deep-seated ontological assumptions, not only those having to do with methodologies and disciplines but also with concepts, the equivalence of which cannot be assumed when dealing with different philosophical systems. The semantics of individuality is a case in point. The concept of individuality was imported to modern China from the West along with the attendant terminology (Moeller 2004); there it was confronted with the Confucian notion of the communal self, which in cross -cultural social
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psychology is causing a re-consideration of the simplistic Western dimensions of individualism and collectivism (Triandis 1995). If the literatures on cross-cultural psychology and cross-cultural management are anything to go by, one would be forgiven for thinking that inter-cultural encounters almost inevitably create discomfort, stress and the likelihood of failure. Far from celebrating cultural difference as an opportunity (Montouri and Fahim 2004), the impression one gathers from many cross national studies of values and perceptions of managers and executives is that of inter-personal and inter-group struggle. Empirical research suggests that cultural diversity undermines the cohesiveness of work teams (van der Zee et al. 2004); Indian values interfere with efficient and effective Western-style business negotiation (Kumar 2004); and positive and negative stereotyping among Israeli and Indian managers has an impact on business relations and outcomes (Zaidman 2000). Practical solutions range from using impression management instead of assertiveness in intercultural encounters (Pacquiao 2000), promoting adaptive selling to improve perceived inter-cultural competence (Bush et al. 2001), developing competencies for managers in charge of a multicultural workforce (Chang and Tharenou 2004), and learning from transnational companies on how to deal with multiple cultures (Sdeberg and Holden 2002). Often, comparative sociological analysis is also modelled on exported Western constructs and findings (Smelser 2003: 648). The combination of multidisciplinarity and comparative research adds a further layer of research questions and issues for researchers, which have emerged from within, among others, cross-cultural management, intercultural communication and cultural psychology. There is agreement that Westernstyle research based on cross-cultural comparisons needs to pay attention to the expectations of the field. In East Asian contexts, in particular, researchers need to attend to the development and maintenance of trust among the participants as well as fostering a flexible and patient attitude in the long process of forming relationships which in many cultures are instrumental to the achievement of the research objectives (Vallaster 2000). For example, an understanding of the norms and values underlying highly face-sensitive inter-cultural encounters is a pre-requisite for an improved success rate in Western-Chinese negotiations (Faure 1998), and references to Confucian philosophy and values have become commonplace in the literature on cross/intercultural business communication. The cognitive role of affect is one of the most important contributions to pragmatics from non-Cartesian (non dualistic) approaches to cognition such as discursive psychology, social constructionism and distributed cognition. It has been forcefully argued that [t]he integration of
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affect/emotion and pragmatics is the first and most important step towards a holistic framework or theory for analyzing linguistic data in context (Kopytko 2004: 522). Drawing from cognitive science, artificial intelligence and linguistics, Kopytko constructs a powerful defence of emotions as essential in explaining social behaviour. Within Relational Pragmatics (RP), cognition and emotion dissolve in a continuum of nondiscrete, fuzzy affective events ranging between cognitive-based to noncognitive-based events. Interactants monitor their own emotions, others emotions and the perceptions of their own emotions by others (Kopytko 2004: 536). Given that interactions are emotionally very complex, interactants will ignore contextual cues and attempt to simplify them, hence overgeneralizing, overreacting and jumping to conclusions. Kopytko challengingly argues that affective texts be they linguistically coded like discussions, disputes or quarrels, or observable through paralinguistics say and reveal more about the current situation than do the linguistic ones (Kopytko 2004: 538). Even texts not readily associated with emotions (scientific, legal, economic) can be defined as affective. Affect is ubiquitous; it is socially constructed and distributed and is involved in linguistic choices at all levels, from phonetic/phonological through to pragmatic/stylistic (Kopytko 2004: 539). Emotions in interactions are modulated by social and cultural norms, power relations, gender, age etc.; affective rights of interactants are also socially dependent. Finally, affect management takes place whenever interactants face emergent emotional events, control their own emotions, strategically use affect and attempt to regulate affective events (Kopytko 2004: 539). (See Samra-Fredericks (2004) for an engaging ethnographic account of business executives doing emotions during strategy meetings). Clyne (2002) remarks that contrastive pragmatic analysis has dominated the field of cross-linguistic research until the early 1990s but has led to no substantive theoretical development. Methods used in past research have ranged from the collection of large corpora of recorded spontaneous interaction to role-play, interviews and participant observation. Clyne goes on to list a number of aspects of discourse that have been studied in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural contexts: speech act realization, discourse organization, modes of address, choice of channel, linguistic creativity (language play and humour), honorific systems, small talk, intonation patterns, negotiation of communication breakdown, interactional patterns (e. g., turn-taking and silence). The challenges faced by researchers wishing to embrace cross-cultural pragmatics have been discussed in articles looking at data collection methods (Beebe and Clark Cummings 1995), speech acts (Cohen 1995) and inter-language data (Hartford and Bardovi-Harlig 1992).
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Pragmatics is particularly suited to chart the dynamics of crosslinguistic contact because pragmatics is firmly embedded in culture (Mey 2004: 45). In order to capture the fact that pragmatics is just as much about the limitations as about the options that are inherent in a situation, Mey proposes the analytical concept of the pragmatic act, where it is the situation that gives the speech act its meaning. Unlike Istvan Kecskes situation-bound utterances, (Kecskes 2000, cited in Mey 2004: 38), which are linked to specific purposes or tasks, a pragmatic act has many behavioural and situational components and can actively create a situation to fit itself (Mey 2004: 3845). The analyst is still left with the ambitious task of discerning the components within the interaction, not relying exclusively on one set of pragmatic assumptions but foregrounding the distinctive pragmatics of the languages in interaction and also displaying sensitivity to the dynamics of the unfolding pragmatics of the specific inter-cultural situation. This twofold engagement acknowledges the fact that the pragmatic acts which inform the interaction will define new pragmatic rules of communicative engagement. Intercultural pragmatics stands to make a significant contribution to the analysis of politeness in intercultural business interactions. The initial volume of the new journal Intercultural Pragmatics proposes a methodologically and epistemologically advanced approach to the study of the intercultural. According to Mey (2004: 28): intercultural pragmatics as a field of research and as an area of practice can contribute to a way out of the dilemma of building a bridge between the two extreme positions: safeguarding the culture-as-culture while attending to the needs of the users. Culture flourishes as situated human practice: removing it from its local conditions or from its dependence on the human usually results in its demise. When cultures come in contact, acculturation or assimilation often take place unless the (usually) minority cultures choose to index their distinctiveness: language is a defining element of this distinctiveness, though non-verbal features (such as dress) can be equally powerful. As a way to capture the situatedness of intercultural pragmatics, Bargiela-Chiappini (2004) proposes a dynamic construct and perspective that seeks to capture culture in the making: interculturality. The ontological fluidity built into interculturality interrogates ethnocentric (i. e., mostly Western) and individualistic perspectives on self, exclusively cognitive explanations for interpersonal relations and national culture as an analytical category. In turn, interculturality requires a review of fundamental constructs such as discourse, culture, and context. These cannot be fixed within tight definitional boundaries; their influence on theoretical and meta-theoretical development in intercultural business discourse
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derives from their interplay with disciplines other than linguistics. According to the interpretative tradition, which includes critical hermeneutics, culture cannot be captured in neat, pre-defined social categories, although, interestingly, prejudices (in the Gadamerian sense of the preexisting tradition from which the self emerges) can be thought of as pre-existing influences. Culture as practice emerging from multimodal interaction affords enough ontological latitude to accommodate novel insights from linguistic anthropology. Negotiation and accommodation in the dialogic construction of intercultural space confront three overlapping dimensions of context: social, linguistic and cognitive. Researchers, practitioners, professionals within the interactional space are all contextualizing agents (Sarangi and Candlin 2001), and their activity is far from neutral as they become embroiled in local power struggles and politics. For purposes of analysis, a high degree of contextualization is crucial. The relevant details are those that enable participants (including observing analysts) to make sense of the interaction, hence the importance of collaborative interpretation, especially in intercultural business encounters affected as they are by competing values, roles and prejudices. Rather than depicting the cultural Other as an obstacle to understanding and intercultural interaction as the locus of inevitable conflict and struggle, it is more productive for intercultural pragmatics to take note of the developments in social and cultural psychology and cross-cultural communication that query the ethnocentricity of much earlier research and the persistence of Western stereotyping within widely used analytical categories. 6. Towards interdisciplinarity We have argued that the study of politeness at work necessarily calls for both multidisciplinarity research and multimethod approaches. An early example of the recognition of the need to bring together multidisciplinary research in a single volume is Hywel Colemans (1989) Working with Language: A Multidisciplinary Consideration of Language Use in Work Contexts. Sarangi and Roberts Talk, Work and Institutional Order: Discourse in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings, published ten years later in 1999, demonstrates how much ground has been covered in the intervening period, though the authors argue that the need for multidisciplinarity and the application of different analytical frameworks in order to increase our understanding of workplace communication is, if anything, even greater: Just as workplace is not easily defined, so it is also no longer possible to identify work based studies with one or two obvious disciplines Such is the nature of discipline boundary-marking
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Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris that communication in the workplace is claimed by different discipline groups as their terrain. Even what counts as a workplace is an inter-disciplinary dispute (Sarangi and Roberts 1999: 5).
There is now an equally pressing need for scholars to come together to discuss the possibility of collaborative research that will be able to count on pooled resources and team effort. The development of distinct disciplines, particularly in recent years, is traceable not only to advances in knowledge but also to the demand for specialist skills required by a more complex, technological society, and the number of new disciplines and sub-disciplines seems to have massively increased. The opposing trend, towards interdisciplinarity, is motivated by the search for a total knowledge and the questioning of the nature of knowledge itself, a twofold response to problems and issues that cannot be addressed by individual disciplines (Moran 2002), whose boundaries have become ever more fuzzy. Whereas in multidisciplinarity discrete disciplines co-exist within a relationship of proximity, interdisciplinarity is transformative and generative of new forms of knowledge (Moran 2002: 16). There are a large number of very real obstacles to effective multidisciplinary research, including the mutual unintelligibility of disciplinary languages, competence-related constraints, issues of method and epistemology, and finally, challenges surrounding the assessment and the evaluation of the research and its dissemination. We would confidently claim, nonetheless, that politeness research is already, in important ways, multidisciplinary, although one cannot always take for granted cross-fertilization between input disciplines and analytical findings. It is, arguably, in the field of comparative analyses of politeness across cultures that the seeds could be sown for an interdisciplinary future; indeed, it has been suggested that proper comparative analysis forces us to be interdisciplinary (Smelser 2002: 653). Interdisciplinarity, however, is almost always a messy endeavour and a difficult one to realize due to the constraints on acquiring multidisciplinary knowledge within an individual career span. Part of the attractiveness of interdisciplinarity to the postmodern researcher is its questioning of claims of scientific objectivity and neutrality. This premise alone is unlikely to destabilize disciplines which are as much a product of institutional and economic pragmatism as they are of intellectual justification (Moran 2002: 186). Pragmatic interdisciplinarity represents a way of living with the disciplines more critically and self-consciously, recognizing that their most basic assumptions can always be challenged and reinvigorated by new ways of thinking from elsewhere (Moran 2002: 187), and nowhere is this more evident and important than in research which centres on the workplace.
Politeness at work: Issues and challenges 7. Future directions for research
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Researchers should seek to explore further the implications and contribution of politeness research to the theoretical and empirical development of intra/inter/cross-cultural communication at work. To this end, they need to: (1) address the issue of what constitutes polite (and impolite) behaviour in specific workplace settings and how such behaviour relates to organizational/institutional norms and practices and to wider concepts of politeness; (2) seek to collect and analyze a much wider range of empirical data involving interaction in both inter- and intracultural workplace settings; and (3) consider the implications of the findings of politeness research for the training of business and professional people in communication and other skills, especially in inter-cultural encounters. Note
1. A dedicated website is available at www.svcc.edu/academics/classes/gadamer/ gadamer.htm
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Politeness at work: Issues and challenges

FRANCESCA BARGIELA-CHIAPPINI and SANDRA HARRIS

Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges

Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges

Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges

Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges

Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges

Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges

Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges

Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges

Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges 7. Future directions for research

Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges

Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges

Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges

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Bargiela Chiappini F. & S. Harris. Politeness at Work. Issues & Challenges (2006)

Bargiela Chiappini F. & S. Harris. Politeness at Work. Issues & Challenges (2006)