3 Case study: Linguistic Landscapes
Linguistic Landscapes [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] is a business consultancy, founded in 2002 by Gill Ereaut, which specialises in tricky organisational problems that seem resistant to improvement. It works with businesses of all sizes, government departments and charities. Gill absolutely believes in the power of language to address organisational issues, especially ones that have their root causes in organisational culture.
Gill uses various types of linguistic techniques such as corpus analysis, discourse studies and conversation analysis (CA) to investigate different kinds of problems that organisations might face. You learned about corpus analysis in Week 2 when the focus was on English language teaching. Broadly speaking, discourse analysis refers to the exploration of how language (written, spoken or signed) is used within a social context. Conversation analysis (often abbreviated to ‘CA’) is a type of discourse analysis which analyses spoken interaction. For example, a researcher might draw on CA to look at how conversation is organised into turns, how people negotiate these turns, who decides on the conversation topics and how these are changed. Conversation analysts might map out the talk in terms of adjacency pairs – two pair parts such as question and answer, greeting and greeting, and complement and acceptance/refusal.
Activity 2 Linking language and organisational culture
Note down ways in which language and organisational culture, as discussed above, might be connected. Note down ways in which language people use might be related to assumptions, beliefs and values.
Discussion
Language is often considered a part of culture, but, as you may have already picked up from this course, language also reflects and creates culture. It reflects and helps shape those beliefs, values and assumptions that are otherwise invisible – Schein’s lowest level, basic underlying assumptions – though it is involved at the other levels too. Gill Ereaut elaborates on this idea in the interview you’ll listen to next.