Workplace interaction from a diversity perspective

In this part of the chapter, I will sum up my discussion by focusing on how diversity issues are dealt with at the hospital and company.

Is there a divide between employees due to language knowledge and communication skills? Have the foreign language users become inte-grated into their working groups? What is the role of the group?

All over the world, we find employees who have not mastered the local workplace language fully. This means that asymmetries between native and non-native users form part of the daily interaction at many workplaces. The asymmetric situation, however, varies from

one workplace to another. For instance, we often find differences between organizations which serve the public in the local community and international organizations which operate in many countries.

As this investigation has also showed, the local majority language is used in the majority of events at the public hospital. Nurses and doctors use Swedish in their daily interaction with patients and exter-nal experts. They also use Swedish at interexter-nal professioexter-nal events, during rounds and staff meetings, and also to socialize, at lunches, coffee breaks and in corridor small talk. Also the shadowed cleaner, Mustafa, uses the local majority language at work. As no one else speaks his mother tongue, Swahili, at the workplace, he has to stick to Swedish, even though it is fairly poor. His Swedish is mixed with English words, which he seems to use unconsciously. He likes to talk and joke, and he and his colleagues generally manage to understand each other. A variety of communicative strategies, however, have to be used in the interaction involving the cleaners. Nevertheless, Mustafa seems to be fairly well integrated in his working team. However, his limited knowledge of the local majority language restricts his possi-bilities of getting a better job. Knowing Swedish is of great import-ance for promotion within the hospital and also for social integration within the workplace.

At the international company studied, proficiency in English creates a divide between the factory floor workers and office staff.

Swedish is important for all employees, as most spoken discourse is carried out in the local majority language. For the factory floor work-ers, Swedish is more or less the only language used at work. The office staff’s working day, however, is bilingual in that they use English for certain purposes and Swedish for others. A lack of English is a bar to promotion within the company, a fact that the factory floor workers are aware of.

The communicative situations for the employees interviewed and shadowed are thus different at the hospital and at the company and also within each environment. What all our informants have in com-mon, however, is that they have a permanent job at their respective workplace, and that they seem to be able to perform the tasks they are assigned. Their position at work and the kinds of tasks they are given correspond to their linguistic competence and communication skills.

Lack of language skills therefore hinders promotion in both environ-ments: at the hospital good Swedish is necessary for a career and at the company both English and Swedish are required. In the company good writing skills are also important for promotion.

An interesting result of the analysis, however, concerns the way the immigrants – irrespective of position and type of job – have developed

communicative strategies, and sometimes also extended their lan-guage proficiencies, in a way that enables them to overcome difficul-ties. Their skills in Swedish – and English – vary, as does their need to read and write at work. In order to cope with the various professional activities during a working day, however, they have developed com-municative strategies which help them complete the tasks they are assigned to perform.

Another interesting result concerns our informants’ level of prag-matic competence. As our recordings reveal, the immigrants shad-owed participate in small talk and socializing events during a working day as full members of their group. Socially they seem to be well integrated into the working groups. For the social integra-tion, pragmatic competence seems to be just as important as correct language use. As our results show, even informants who are not very good at Swedish are able to participate fully in the various socializ-ing events at work. They understand their colleagues’ humour and irony, and can also make jokes themselves. When you joke, you run the risk of being misunderstood and misinterpreted. Our informants are obviously not afraid to take this risk, which could be seen as a sign of their membership of the group. At least they seem to feel confi-dent enough among their colleagues to dare to take the risk of making a fool of themselves.

An important purpose of the research project is to explore inter-action at work in order to gain an understanding of discursive and communicative factors that have a beneficial effect on the integration of immigrants into the working environment. A sociolinguistic per-spective on interaction also means of course that workmates and pro-fessional colleagues are considered to be important for the relative success of the individual immigrant. The sociocultural climate at the workplace and within the organizational units can contribute to – or indeed also impede – the immigrant’s integration into the group and adoption of a social role. The two women’s involvement in non-profit socializing work groups can be seen as a sign of their workplace inte-gration. They are accepted by their fellow workers; they are also seen and allowed to take on socially relevant roles.

The individual’s job identity is constructed in the interaction with fellow workers, which means that the relative success of an immi-grant also depends on the sociocultural climate at the workplace and within the working group. The fact that the immigrants studied are integrated into their working groups could thus be said to show that these groups are culturally and linguistically tolerant and open to diversity. At least we can say that these groups do not seem to have impeded the integration of the foreign language users.

10.7 Conclusions

One aim of this chapter has been to explore what the term ‘multi-lingual’ entails in relation to workplace discourse. The two working environments studied, the hospital and the company, are both multi-lingual in terms of their workforce in the sense that several of their employees are multilingual and have to use their second, third or fourth language at work. In the company studied, the term ‘multilin-gual’ also refers to its organizational structure so that it uses English as its corporate language and the national majority language as its local workplace language. As the company operates in several coun-tries, this means that the national majority languages vary from one workplace to the other.

Another aim has been to discuss the complexity of workplace multilingualism. In order to picture this complexity, I chose three perspectives for my analysis: that of the professional group, of the linguistic-cultural community, and of the individual employees. To conclude, I would like to stress here that if we wish to understand how individual employees become – or do not become – profession-ally and sociprofession-ally integrated into a working group, we need to include an analysis of the organizational structure of text and talk, the use of different languages at work and the social climate within the working group. Integration into a group depends not only on the individual but also on their fellow workers and the group climate.

Notes

1. The concepts of ‘code switching’, ‘code mixing’ and ‘diglossia’ are discussed in Hudson (1996). See also Auer (1998) for a discussion of ‘code switching in conversation’.

2. Fishman (1970) gives an early definition of the concept of ‘diglossia’.

3. For overviews of the field ‘interactional sociolinguistics’, see Schiffrin (1994) and Tannen (2005).

4. See Erickson and Schultz (1982) and Gumperz (1982b).

5. A number of studies on workplace discourse have been carried out in New Zealand within the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project. Among the large number of publications emanating from this group, here I would like to mention: Holmes et al. (1999), Holmes (2000), Holmes and Stubbe (2003), Marra and Holmes (2004), Holmes (2005).

6. The research project has been financed by the Swedish Research Council. The pub-lications include: Andersson and Nelson (2005), Nelson and Andersson (2005), Andersson (2007), Nelson (2007), and Nelson (2008).

7. In Karlsson (2006), an ethnographic study of literacy at work is presented. The employees shadowed include a truck-driver, a nurse, a shop assistant, a ‘pre-school teacher’ and a building worker. A similar role of text and writing is found for the nurse in this study as in our study.