Transcript

PRESENTER

In this audio clip Gill Ereaut talks about how linguistic analysis can shed light on organisational issues and culture.

GILL EREAUT

We provide a form of organisational consulting and we are essentially interested in helping organisations that want to change and/or organisations that want to connect better with their audiences or customers. And we do that through using linguistics and discourse analysis to allow people in an organisation to be able to see more clearly the culture of the organisation. Culture is a really important factor in business success – culture being defined in all sorts of ways, but loosely as, you know, the way we do things around here. I would tend to talk of it in terms of unspoken assumptions and this is who we are, what we do, what matters to us, not spoken, crucial to business success, really hard to get a hold on. What it seems to me underpins almost everything is the notion that sitting kind of underneath are a whole set of assumptions, presuppositions, a kind of completely taken-for-granted, an unspoken world view; and if we’re looking at culture as the unspoken, by looking at linguistic data from the everyday life of the organisation, it allows us to say, from the way you talk around here, it looks like this is what you believe.

And in the light of what you tell us you’re trying to do, strategically, we just invite you to look at those unspoken assumptions for their usefulness for what you’re trying to do. When people first join a new organisation, for the first few weeks and months they can hear the way it speaks, you know, and they’re kind of like ‘Oh God!’, you know, this weird, weird way. And it’s not just that the new place has new words for old things, it actually kind of structures the world differently.

It will chop the world up into different categories and there are different implied connections between those categories, and so on. After a few months, people can’t hear the language anymore, because what you’re doing when you first join an organisation is rapidly trying to get up to speed with the culture. My first degree was in psychology, then spent many years working in commercial research – so, market research – and for both the commercial and for public sector organisations. But also I got increasingly interested in the way that my client organisations spoke. So I would sit in a briefing meeting with Unilever or American Express, or, you know, whoever it was, and I would sit there and think that’s a really interesting planet you live on guys. They would have this perfectly free-formed set of vocabulary and I didn’t have the words to talk about it then, but then constructed the world in a particular way. And they constructed their consumers and their behaviour in a particular way. And I knew, as a researcher, that when I went and spoke to their consumers, their planet – their world – would look very different. And then through a different route I ended up going back to university and doing masters and chose to do a course in CA. It was like a light bulb kind of going bang, you know this whole world of discourse analysis in its loosest form opened up and I realised this could be the set of tools that would allow me to think and help an organisation see what it was doing to itself with its own language. So I founded Linguistic Landscapes really on the kind of burning curiosity. And within a year or two, less really, it was clear that you can make a consulting business, because this gives clients a perspective on their problems they have not had before.