Negotiating boundaries at work: membership and belonging
The modern workplace is transient and diverse. Employees are called to work in teams and operate at the interface of linguistic, professional and geographical boundaries. Moving between teams (or jobs, countries and professions) involves managing multiple different norms and ways of doing in enacting professional roles and identities. Employees negotiate belonging and index group membership, or the opposite, in daily life at work which has implications for claiming, and being accepted or not, as ‘one of us’. This is linguistically enacted but there is little socio/linguistic research on boundaries and boundary crossing in the workplace.
In this paper, I draw on current and recently completed work and discuss how employees do membership to a group. I take a critical stance and bring together analytical principles from interaction analysis and critical discourse traditions. I present data from two settings, a new employee negotiating hegemonic ideologies and hierarchies and a team of newly established middle managers. The datasets are collected following an ethnographic design and consist of observations, interviews and naturally occurring interaction. The analysis shows that employees actively negotiate the power im/balance in enacting their professional roles and identities and do belonging and fitting in in the process. I close the paper with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of the current theoretical and methodological apparatus for the study of workplace interaction and provide directions for further research.
Jo Angouri is Reader at The University of Warwick, UK. Her research expertise is in sociolinguistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis. She has carried out projects in a range of multilingual and multinational corporate and institutional contexts and her work concerns both online and face to face interaction. She has published widely on language and identity as well as teamwork and leadership in professional settings. Her current research includes a project on teamwork in medical emergencies and multidisciplinary work on migration and the labour market. Jo is Co-Director of two international networks, MITN (Migration, Identity and Translation Network) under the Warwick-Monash Alliance and ReNMigrantsWL (Migrants in Working life). She has recently edited a volume on Boundaries at Work (with M. Marra and J. Holmes, EUP, 2017) and she is working on a monograph on Culture at Work for Routledge. She is series editor for DAPSAC for Benjamins and Language at Work for Multilingual Matters. Jo is visiting Distinguished Professor of Organisation and Management and International Business at Aalto University, School of Business.