4 Culture and language
In the following interview, Gill Ereaut elaborates on the idea of language reflecting and creating culture.
Activity 3 Interview with Gill Ereaut part 1
Listen to the first part of the interview. As you listen, pay attention to what Gill says about the following:
- what culture is
- the connection between culture and language
- how she sees discourse analysis in relation to her work.
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.
Discussion
Gill talks about culture as ‘the way we do things around here’; but also as ‘unspoken assumptions about who we are, what we do, what matters to us’; and ‘a world view’. This is very much in line with Schein’s three-level model above – mostly these fall into the middle and bottom levels. For Gill, language is essentially the only visible manifestation of unspoken assumptions. The assumptions are not explicitly stated, but the way the company constructs the world around it using language nevertheless reflects these underlying ideas. As a result, linguistic analysis (or, as Gill says, ‘discourse analysis in its loosest form’) represents a set of tools that can give businesses a perspective on their problems they have not had before.
The idea that a company can construct the world around it through language relates to one of the fundamental assumptions of the linguistic theory Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL): language is made up of sets of viable options of meaning. Each choice ‘acquires its meanings against the background of other choices which could have been made’ and so reflects some underlying assumption, understanding or attitude.
Activity 4 Entering a new workplace
Can you remember a time when you entered a new workplace, institution or club and could ‘hear the way it talked’, as Gill puts it? What were some of the things that seemed strange to you? What might these things say about the organisation’s worldview?
Discussion
Here is an example answer:
I once worked in a small company where the stated motto of work was ‘serious fun’. One of the fun things the company did was to give all the electronic equipment (computers, laptops, printers, servers, etc.) names of Wild West characters. There was Billy the Kid and Buffalo Bill, Annie and Tonto. This often led to some quite bizarre sentences being uttered, but actually made the atmosphere a lot more personal. The machines were metaphorically talked about as people with mood swings and attitudes: ‘Billy the Kid [a printer] doesn’t want to play today’; ‘Tonto [a computer] has gone on strike’. This suggested a worldview where all parts of the work environment were animated and therefore to be treated with a degree of respect and compassion. I initially found it difficult to join in, mostly because I didn’t know many Wild West characters, but in a tiny company it’s almost impossible to resist these things. It’s about being part of the group.