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

| 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
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.20070.han
References
Allport, G.
(1957) The Nature of Prejudice. Addison-Wesley: Reading, MA.Google Scholar
Anderson, D.
(1983) Imagined Communities. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Bamberg, M.
(2006) Stories: Big or small: Why do we care? Narrative Inquiry, 16(1), 139–147. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bamberg, M. and Georgakopoulou, A.
(2008) Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis. Text and Talk, 28(3), 377–396. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bar-Tal, D.
(1997) Formation and change of ethnic and national stereotypes: an integrative model. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 201, 341–70. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Befu, H.
(2001) Hegemony of Homogeneity. Portland: Trans-Pacific Press.Google Scholar
Benwell, B. & Stokoe, E.
(2006) Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Bhabha, H.
(1994) The Location of Culture. Routledge: London.Google Scholar
Billig, M.
(1995) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Bordalo, P., Coffman, K., Gennaioli, N., and Shleifer, A.
(2016) Stereotypes. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 13(1), 1753–1794. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K.
(2005) Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Carbaugh, D.
(2007) Cultural Discourse Analysis: Communication practices and intercultural encounters, Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 36(3), 167–182. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cortazzi, M. and Jin, L.
(2000) Evaluating evaluation in narrative. In Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse, S. Hunston and G. Thompson (eds.), 102–120. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
De Fina, A. and Georgakopoulou, A.
(2008) Analysing narratives as practices. Qualitative Research, 8(3), 379–387. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Foreman-Peck, J. and Yi Wang
(2014) The Costs to the UK of Language Deficiencies as a Barrier to UK Engagement in Exporting: A Report to UKTIGoogle Scholar
Foucault, M.
(1978) The History of Sexuality:1. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Hall, S.
(2013) The Spectacle of the ‘Other’ In Representation, S. Hall, J. Evans and S. Nixon (eds.), 215–287. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Handford, M.
(2010) The Language of Business Meetings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2020) Training “international engineers” in Japan: discourse, Discourse and stereotypes. In Language in the Professions: Consultancy, Advocacy, Activism, L. Mullany (ed.), 29–46. London: Palgrave. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Heritage, J.
(2005) Conversation analysis and institutional talk. In The Handbook of Language and Social Interaction, K. Fitch and R. Sanders (eds.), 103–147. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Hinton, P.
(2002) Stereotypes, Cognition and Culture. Hove: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Holmes, J.
(2005) Story-telling at work: a complex discursive resource for integrating personal, professional and social identities. Discourse Studies, 7(6), 671–700. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Holmes, J. and Marra, M.
(2005) Narrative and the construction of professional identity in the workplace, In The Sociolinguistics of Narrative, J. Thornborrow and J. Coates (eds.), 193–213. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Holmes, J. and Stubbe, M.
(2016) Power and Politeness in the Workplace (2nd Ed.). London: Longman.Google Scholar
Kashima, Y. and Yeung, V.
(2010) Serial reproduction: An experimental simulation of cultural dynamics. Acta Psychologica Sinica, 42(1), 56–71. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Koester, A.
(2006) Investigating Workplace Discourse. London: Routledge. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Koester, A. and Handford, M.
(2018) ‘It’s not good saying “Well it it might do that or it might not”’: Hypothetical reported speech in business meetings. Journal of Pragmatics. 1301: 67–80. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Labov
(1972) Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, G.
(1989) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, J.
(1980) Metaphors we Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Landy, F.
(2008) Stereotypes, bias, and personnel decisions: Strange and stranger. Industrial and Organisational Psychology. 1(4), 379–392. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Leerssen
2016 Imagology: On using ethnicity to make sense of the world. Iberica. 101: 13–31.Google Scholar
Linde, C.
1993 Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Maass, A.
(1999) Linguistic Intergroup Bias: Stereotype Perpetuation Through Bias. Advances in Experimenta Psychology, 311: 79–122. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mor Barak, M. and Travis, D.
(2009) Diversity and organizational performance. In Human Services as Complex Organizations. (2nd Ed.), Y. Hansfeld (ed.), 341–378. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Morrison, T.
(1990) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the literary imagination. London: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Ochs, E. and Capp, L.
(2001) Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
OHCHR
(2003) “International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination”, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Accessed June 2020: https://​www​.ohchr​.org​/EN​/ProfessionalInterest​/Pages​/CERD​.aspx
Piller, I.
(2011) Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Puxan-Oliva, M.
(2015) Racial Stereotypes as Narrative Forms: Staging the English Gentleman in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. Journal of Narrative Theory, 45(3), 333–369. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rothbart, M., and Taylor, M.
(1992) Category labels and social reality: Do we view social categories as natural kinds? In Language, Interaction and Social Cognition, G. Semin and K. Fiedler (eds.), 11–36. London, England: Sage.Google Scholar
Sarangi, S., and Roberts, C.
(1999) The dynamics of interactional and institutional orders in work-related settings. In Talk, Work and the Institutional Order, S. Sarangi & C. Roberts (eds.), 2–57. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Schnurr, S. and Zayts, O.
(2017) Language and Culture at Work. Abingdon: Routledge. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Schröter, M. and Taylor, C.
(2018) Introduction. In Exploring Absence and Silence in Discourse, M. Schröter and C. Taylor (eds.), 1–21. London: Palgrave. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, G. and Hunston, S.
(2000) Evaluation: An introduction. In Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse, S. Hunston and G. Thompson (eds.), 1–27. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Thornborrow, J.
(2002) Power Talk: Language and Interaction in Institutional Discourse. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Thornborrow, J. and Coates, J.
(2005) The Sociolinguistics of narrative: Identity, performance, culture, In The Sociolinguistics of Narrative, J. Thornborrow and J. Coates (eds.), 1–16. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Toolan, M.
(1988) Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Van Dijk, T.
(1987) Communicating Racism: Ethnic Prejudice in Talk and Thought. London: Sage.Google Scholar