Week 3: Exploring language in organisational culture change

Introduction

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A photograph of a group of colleagues in a work environment.

• Why don’t customers behave in the way organisations want them to?
• Why does a company have more male than female customers?
• How could companies improve their relationships with stakeholders?
• Why might an organisation find it difficult to change its culture?

Whatever your current work, study or personal situation, it’s likely you’ve had some experience of being a member of an organisation. And, particularly if you’ve been a member of a large organisation, you may have come across the idea of changing the culture – or unvoiced attitudes and behaviours – within the organisation. But what might this entail? And how could exploring language help in changing organisational culture?

In Week 1 you saw how grammar can be applied in company and product branding. Here in Week 3 you’ll look at how language analysis can be applied in another commercial context. This time the focus is on the role of language and linguistic analysis in understanding and changing organisational culture (defined here as the implicit attitudes and behaviours within large organisations).

By the end of this week, you should be able to:

• understand how language analysis can help in changing organisational culture
• see how conversation analysis can support the process of change
• understand some useful concepts in discourse analysis.