The Role of /Overlaps\ in Intercultural Workplace Interaction

<p>The field of workplace communication continues to grow, and globalisation has encouraged researchers to focus on the phenomenon of intercultural interaction in multi-cultural workplaces. Usually, but not exclusively, framed within the constructs of Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory, intercultural studies have typically concentrated on instances of miscommunication taking a partial, one-sided account of intercultural workplace interaction. Differing social norms for what constitutes politeness have been a major focus of debate into the merits of politeness theory. Overlapping speech, in particular, is one aspect of workplace interaction that has been long neglected in the field of intercultural workplace interaction research. Moving away from the traditional views in the field, the present study takes a positive stance on the study of the interplay of interactional norms of politeness in intercultural face-to-face workplace interaction and investigates how people from different ethnic backgrounds undertake relational work in naturally-occurring workplace exchanges. As the analytic framework, rapport management (developed by Spencer-Oatey) provides a useful reconceptualisation of linguistic politeness with a greater focus on negotiated interaction. The analysis focuses on the role of overlapping speech in this context of interaction guided by two research questions: 1) how does overlapping speech function in workplace interactions in New Zealand? and 2) how are these overlaps intended and 'perceived' by culturally different interactants? To this end, the data for the present study were drawn from two meetings in a large educational institution in New Zealand. In the first phase of data collection, two meetings were video and audio recorded, from which representative extracts containing overlaps were chosen for analysis. In the second phase, individual stimulated recall interviews were held with the participants with the purpose of eliciting participants' intentions and perceptions regarding the use of overlaps. The findings suggest that this group of instructors operate as a Community of Practice (CofP) rather than as ethnic individualities with shared assumptions and expectations regarding the appropriate use of overlaps to cooperatively construct meaning in interaction. This CofP, it was noted, is also strongly oriented towards the maintenance and enhancement of social harmony in their workplace interaction, which influences the use of overlapping speech as a communicative strategy employed to this end. Overall, the study demonstrates that considering intercultural communication from the perspective of rapport management can provide positive insights into how people from different ethnic backgrounds do relational work as they construct meaning in interaction.</p>

The Role of /Overlaps\ in Intercultural Workplace Interaction

<p>The field of workplace communication continues to grow, and globalisation has encouraged researchers to focus on the phenomenon of intercultural interaction in multi-cultural workplaces. Usually, but not exclusively, framed within the constructs of Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory, intercultural studies have typically concentrated on instances of miscommunication taking a partial, one-sided account of intercultural workplace interaction. Differing social norms for what constitutes politeness have been a major focus of debate into the merits of politeness theory. Overlapping speech, in particular, is one aspect of workplace interaction that has been long neglected in the field of intercultural workplace interaction research. Moving away from the traditional views in the field, the present study takes a positive stance on the study of the interplay of interactional norms of politeness in intercultural face-to-face workplace interaction and investigates how people from different ethnic backgrounds undertake relational work in naturally-occurring workplace exchanges. As the analytic framework, rapport management (developed by Spencer-Oatey) provides a useful reconceptualisation of linguistic politeness with a greater focus on negotiated interaction. The analysis focuses on the role of overlapping speech in this context of interaction guided by two research questions: 1) how does overlapping speech function in workplace interactions in New Zealand? and 2) how are these overlaps intended and 'perceived' by culturally different interactants? To this end, the data for the present study were drawn from two meetings in a large educational institution in New Zealand. In the first phase of data collection, two meetings were video and audio recorded, from which representative extracts containing overlaps were chosen for analysis. In the second phase, individual stimulated recall interviews were held with the participants with the purpose of eliciting participants' intentions and perceptions regarding the use of overlaps. The findings suggest that this group of instructors operate as a Community of Practice (CofP) rather than as ethnic individualities with shared assumptions and expectations regarding the appropriate use of overlaps to cooperatively construct meaning in interaction. This CofP, it was noted, is also strongly oriented towards the maintenance and enhancement of social harmony in their workplace interaction, which influences the use of overlapping speech as a communicative strategy employed to this end. Overall, the study demonstrates that considering intercultural communication from the perspective of rapport management can provide positive insights into how people from different ethnic backgrounds do relational work as they construct meaning in interaction.</p>

“Consent Is F#@king Required”: Hashtag Feminism Surrounding Sexual Consent in a Culture of Postfeminist Contradictions

Hashtag feminism exists in a time of postfeminist contradictions marked by the simultaneous existence of popular feminism and popular misogyny. In one such contradiction, popular feminism has led women to expect the successful negotiation of sexual consent, while popular misogyny permits the circulation of traditional sexual scripts that disregard the necessity of consent. In this study, we analyze messages conveyed through digitized narratives of sexual consent posted on Tumblr, a social media site that is popular among feminist activists, to identify the ways that users construct meaning around the dissonance between expectations for consent and the inequalities that inhibit its negotiation. We specifically explore whether hashtag feminism navigates postfeminist contradictions in a way that simultaneously calls out misogyny and calls on feminism. We find that the Tumblr posts in our sample did both, albeit in a manner that failed to offer tangible solutions to the problem at hand. Calls on feminism were largely limited to tagging feminist allies and recirculating existing feminist campaigns. Thus, we argue that the hashtag ultimately became a handoff to a larger feminist abstraction. Future research should explore conditions under which activists link tangible issues, actors, and agendas to an otherwise abstract popular feminism.

Interdental /s/ in Salvadoran Spanish:

This study provides a systematic account of the occurrence of interdental /s/ in Salvadoran Spanish and explores speakers’ attitudes toward its use. Specifically, it examines the linguistic, social, and stylistic contexts in which this understudied variant occurs, and it describes how the speakers construct meaning through it despite being a stigmatized variant. It was found that this variant is more likely to be observed in syllable-onset position both word-medially and initially. Additionally, it is more likely to be observed in casual style in the youngest and oldest age groups and it is less likely observed in the speech of professionals. There are indications that this variant is associated with an age-grading phenomena, which is also indicative of stable variation. The present work fills an almost a 30+ year old gap left by previous studies that only briefly touched upon this variant.

Is the Noise the Message in Psychoanalytic Listening?

In psychoanalytic discourse, the question of meaning or lack thereof should be relegated only to the domain of the interlocutor's perception. Not every slip of the tongue or bungled action is necessarily precipitated by some unconscious motivation, although one may construct meaning for it après coup (Nachträglichkeit). What is a message versus a noise depends on the perceptual experience of the analytic couple, and a cigar, if not just a cigar, depends on the context-specific fantasy of the perceiver. The author's aim is to show the difficulty of distinguishing the noise from the message in the interactive matrix of the analytic situation. Yet what at first may seem to be a banal error such as double-booking may at times enliven a stultified course of the analytic process; it may even drag a stillborn transference out of its embalmed closet.

Working with the potential of arts-based learning: Making sense and leaving ‘business as usual’ behind in an art seminar

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the interest in arts-based learning as part of the growing literature on artistic initiatives in business contexts, by advancing the understanding of the potential of arts-based business learning that people can yet fail to benefit from. We draw on Weick’s framework for how people construct meaning in organized situations and on a qualitative study of an art seminar in business education to consider arts-based learning in the face of pitfalls that can prevent people from engaging in approaches that differ from their usual ones and from which they can learn. We show that people can benefit from the potential of arts-based business learning when collective meaning-construction processes such as sensemaking or sensegiving can unfold and work in an iterative, active and intense way, to take people towards new experiences. Our study also highlights the usefulness of taking a perspective centred on ongoing collective meaning-construction processes and of focusing on both learning activities and learning situations when studying business learning.

Food Activism and Language in a Slow Food Italy Restaurant Menu

This essay explores how food activists in Italy purposely shape food and language to construct meaning and value. It is grounded in years of ethnographic fieldwork on food and culture in Italy and looks specifically at the Slow Food Movement. The essay explores language and food activism through a detailed unpacking of the text of a menu prepared for a restaurant dinner for delegates to the Slow Food National Chapter Assembly in 2009. The menu uses descriptive poetic language to construct an idealized folk cuisine steeped in local products, poverty, history, and peasant culinary traditions. As I explore the language of the menu and the messages communicated by the food, I ask if they intensify people’s activism, advance Slow Food’s goals of “good, clean and fair food,” and promote food democracy.

Izotopie w praktyce analizy dzieła muzycznego – na przykładzie "Arabesque" Zygmunta Krauzego

The aim of the paper is to reconsider the question of usefulness of the category of isotopy in semiotic analysis of a musical composition, on the example of Zygmunt Krauze’s Arabesque (1983) for prepared piano and instrumental ensemble. Adopting a suggestion by Nicolas Meeùs, the author undertakes an attempt to transpose Rastier’s differentiation between semantic isotopy and isotopy of the plane of expression (isotopie de l’expression) into analysis of music. Following Michel Arrivé, she presents a model example of isotopic relations in the plane of expression (signifiant) from the novel Les jours et les nuits (Days and Nights) by Alfred Jarry, and finds that isotopy of the plane of expression is for linguistic semioticians an alternative to semantic isotopy in providing cohesiveness in the layer of signs that construct meaning. She then discusses the extent of application of isotopy in music semiotics and draws attention to the semantic capacity of this category in Eero Tarasti’s theory and interpretive practice, where it undergoes metaphorisation and a kind of universalisation. She also refers to the proposal of Jean-Pierre Bartoli to use isotopy in analysing Orientalistic exoticism, which constitutes an example of a return to the level of the simplest constitutive units and the condition of their iteration, i.e., to the structuralistic-semiotic conceptions of isotopy in the approach of Greimas. Moving on to an analysis of Krauze’s composition, the author puts forward the view that Rastier’s categories of isotopy of the plane of expression as „conditions of grammaticality” (conditions de grammaticalité) of an utterance can only apply to specific cases of compositional techniques which are utterances in systemic „musical languages”, and this condition is not met in the case of the work analysed. The argumentation presented in the article is based on an analysis of particular features of the organisation of the sound material, the texture and syntax of Arabesque, as well as references to the composer’s claim to have been inspired by the mystical paintings of Władysław Strzemiński and the oriental connotations of arabesqueness in music. In seeking the musical meaning of Krauze’s Arabesque the author focuses on identifying its intentio operis.

Suggestive Landscape

Blended Classic Joint Attention (BCJA) can deploy blends of form-meaning pairs across multiple modalities to suggest paths along which to construct meaning rather than to make assertions or convey information. An illustration is provided of suggestive landscapes, focusing on blended classic joint attention in the construal of an American college campus.