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Article published In:
Narratives as Social Practice in Organisational Contexts
Edited by Dorien Van De Mieroop, Jonathan Clifton and Stephanie Schnurr
[Narrative Inquiry 32:1] 2022
► pp. 218–243

“I tell you don’t trust the French”

National stereotypes in workplace narratives

ORCID logo | Cardiff University

National stereotypes are inherently evaluative, often negatively, and potentially prejudicial. While research has examined stereotypes from an organisational perspective, this is overwhelmingly in experimental settings involving students (Landy, 2008); in other words not in workplaces, and not involving employees doing their jobs. Through a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of 53 authentic business meetings, this study finds that among certain communities, national stereotypes are used in workplace narratives, and argues that such narratives constitute a contextual, situated social practice. The novel methodology pinpoints and categorises all stereotypes in business-meeting narratives, before discussing what role they play in indexing the identities of the stereotyped and the stereotyping. Finally, evaluation, ideology and power are critically engaged with to explain their use or non-use, thus making a theoretical contribution to studies of evaluation, workplace narratives, and stereotyping in discourse. While ethically problematic, and potentially detrimental to business success, their use may be motivated by local workplace goals.

Keywords: national-stereotypes, business-meetings, workplace-narratives-as-practice, indexicality, identity, evaluation, power, discourse, corpus
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Conceptual background
    • Narrative
    • Stereotypes and narratives
    • Indexicality, identity, evaluation and power
  • Methodology
  • Analysis and discussion
    • Categorising WNNSs
    • WNNSs and identity
    • Evaluation and power
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Transcription code
  • References
Published online: 18 May 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.20070.han
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