Politeness at work: Issues and challenges

FRANCESCA BARGIELA-CHIAPPINI and SANDRA HARRIS

Abstract

In this article we will attempt to address some of the issues that arise inresearching politeness in the workplace, especially, though not exclusively,in the context of multicultural and multilingual encounters. We propose tolook at debates around the nature of politeness and their relevance forresearch in work settings and to discuss the contribution made to thesedebates by analyses of politeness in the workplace. Finally, we will discusssome of the methodological problems that field researchers will face whenconducting research on the field, especially in intercultural work contexts.These will include, for example, issues such as the choice of methodology/s, confidentiality, the nature of the involvement of the researcher, makinguse of multi-method approaches, the comparability of analytical categoriesacross different languages and culture. Finally, we suggest, very briefly,some directions for further research.

Keywords: politeness; workplace communication; face; research methodol-ogies; cross-cultural communication; interculturality

1. Introduction

The first question that presents itself when considering politeness in the

workplace relates to the nature of politeness itself and its possible varia-

tions in settings where interpersonal behaviour is also affected by specific

situational and institutional norms and practices. Indeed, in the social

order that underpins work exchanges, we would assume “politeness” to

be one of the complex sets of factors constantly at play in dyadic or

multiparty encounters, whether face to face or mediated. Holmes and

Stubbe (2003: 5) state that their “analyses indicate that most workplace

interactions provide evidence of mutual respect and concern for the feel-

ings or face needs of others: i. e. of politeness”. Arguably, respect, face

Journal of Politeness Research 2 (2006), 7�33 1612-5681/06/002�0007

� Walter de Gruyter

8 Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

and feelings for others are very often central to a working definition of

politeness, as even a cursory look at the extensive literature confirms.

Much of this literature is focused on language, and it is not surprising

that linguistics and pragmatics are two disciplines that have made a dis-

tinctive and substantial contribution to the understanding of politeness.

Other disciplines, such as social psychology, anthropology and sociol-

ogy, have also highlighted some of the factors that affect the linguistic

expression of politeness, especially but not only, in intercultural en-

counters (e. g., Holtgraves and Yang 1990; Kwarciak 1993; Lim 1994).

In this article we concentrate on research on linguistic politeness emanat-

ing from linguistics and pragmatics and will only attempt to refer to the

contributions of other disciplines when necessary. Non-verbal behaviour

cannot be considered here, though its importance for the study of polite-

ness is clear, and it constitutes a field of study in itself. Methodologically,

research on linguistic politeness in the past has often relied on elicited

or simulated data but during the past decade or so, a number of scholars

have turned their attention to “naturally-occurring” interactions. While

this has been a fruitful development, it has also given rise to a host of

new challenges for field researchers who have to deal with issues of ac-

cess, legitimacy, confidentiality and ethics in order to work alongside

their institutional or business counterparts.

The research scenario is further complicated in intercultural or cross-

cultural analyses where linguistic and cultural sensitivity is also crucial.

For example, the comparability of analytical categories across diverse

cultures as well as the use of concepts developed by Western psychology

or sociology are two of the issues that researchers need to address when

they become involved in international collaborative programmes or sim-

ply when they find themselves working across cultural borders. It is

probably useful to clarify initially what we mean by “inter-cultural” and

“cross-cultural”, as these terms are often used interchangeably. Consis-

tent with earlier work (Bargiela-Chiappini and Nickerson 2003; Bargiela-

Chiappini 2004), we adopt the definitions of Gudykunst (2002: 175�176), whereby “cross-cultural” refers to comparisons of different cultures

in situations of non-contact and “inter-cultural” to comparisons of cul-

tures in contact. (“Intracultural” describes behaviour within a culture.)

Finally, though the term “workplace” has come recently to signify a very

broadly based concept, our focus in this article will be primarily on

business, managerial and corporate settings, largely for reasons of space

and the thematic emphasis of the current issue.

2. Background

In her entry on “Politeness” for the International Encyclopedia for Socialand Behavioral Sciences, Penelope Brown (2001) defines politeness as

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges 9

referring to verbal and nonverbal concerns for social persona or “face”,

expressed linguistically through deviations from the efficient exchange

of information predicated in Grice’s Cooperative Principle (CP). Taking

another look at Grice’s (1975) work, we note that he concedes that in

addition to his well-known Four Maxims, there are “all sorts of other

maxims (aesthetic, social, or moral in character) such as ‘Be Polite’,

which are also normally observed by participants in talk exchanges”

(cited in Kingwell 1993: 390). Indeed, politeness theory has come a long

way from Grice’s view of it as a deviation from an ideal norm of com-

municative efficiency and mainly related to conversational implicature.

In particular, recent theoretical discussions on the nature of politeness

(e. g., Eelen 2001; Mills 2003; Watts 2003; Locher 2004) fully recognize

its complexity as a study in its own right and as a crucial aspect of

interactional pragmatics. Moreover, it has become much more generally

accepted that politeness and the social and moral order are intermeshed

in ways which go beyond “face”. For this reason alone, studying polite-

ness is an enterprise that deserves not only renewed vigour and commit-

ment but also a multidisciplinary approach.

The study of politeness in the corporate workplace dates back to the

analyses of written texts such as business and administrative correspon-

dence in English, where the focus was on lexico-grammatical features

accomplishing specific politeness strategies (e. g., Maier 1992, Bargiela-

Chiappini and Harris 1996, Graham and David 1996; Pilegaard 1997;

Nickerson 1999; Mackiewicz and Riley 2003). More recently, data in

other languages has been analyzed, sometimes from a contrastive per-

spective (e. g., Yeung 1997; Kong 1998a, 2005 forthcoming; McLaren

2001; Zhu 2001; Vergaro 2002), while historical linguists have contrib-

uted research on forms of “polite expression” in centuries-old business

texts (Becker 2002; Tiisala 2004). More recently, the literature on polite-

ness has begun to reflect the growing interest in spoken interaction in

institutional, professional and corporate settings. See, for example, re-

search on politeness strategies in service encounters (Lambert 1996,

Kong 1998b; Pan 2000b; Norris and Rowsell 2003; Placencia 2004; Kaur

2005); in institutional settings (e. g., Roberts 1992; Hummert and Mazlof

2001; Jameson 2003; Ostermann 2003; Delbene 2004); in bicultural and

multicultural workplaces (Clyne et al. 1991; Clyne 1994; Miller 1994);

and in mediated workplace communication (e. g., McEnery et al. 2002;

Morand and Ocker 2002; Hobbs 2003).

The study of politeness in business negotiations, in particular, has

attracted the attention of scholars intent on applying findings from

cross-cultural and intercultural analyses to the improvement of teaching

and training materials (e. g., Marriott 1990 and 1995; van der Wijst and

Ulijn 1995; le Pair 1999). Business meetings have also proved a fruitful

10 Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

generic type of discourse (e. g., Yamada 1992; Miller 1994; Pan 2000a).

However, reservations on the use of discrete categories, such as Brown

and Levinson’s (1987) positive and negative politeness strategies, for the

analysis of multicultural meetings have been expressed. For example,

Poncini found that “one utterance could conceivably fall into a number

of strategy categories, making the use of this [politeness] framework

problematic” (Poncini 2004: 64).

At this point it is worth noting another group of scholars who have

taken a different approach to issues of face and politeness in meetings,

i. e., “rapport management” where politeness is one of a number of inter-

actional domains. The underlying concern here is the relational work

that informs business interactions (e. g., Miller 1995). Defining “rapport

management” as her central concern, Spencer-Oatey (2000) outlines the

its salient principles, which she then applies to Chinese-British meetings

(Spencer-Oatey 2002; Spencer-Oatey and Xing 2003). Planken (2003,

2005) uses the same framework in her analyses of negotiations. The work

of Xing (2002) on relational management is also inspired by this ap-

proach, whereas Bilbow (1997a, 1997b) employs the concept of “impres-

sion management” in his analyses of multicultural business meetings in

Hong Kong. The importance of the “relational” aspect of workplace

discourse applies also to certain other approaches, such as genre theory.

For example, in a recent analysis of office conversations, small talk fre-

quently constitutes the opening and closing phases of task-oriented en-

counters, and even talk that is primarily transactional reveals concerns

and features which are essentially of a relational nature (Koester 2004).

An important development in research concerned with politeness at

work is the publication of Holmes and Stubbe (2003), Power and Polite-ness in the Workplace, based on data collected in New Zealand in con-

junction with the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project. Set-

tings include factories, government departments, small businesses and

corporate organizations. Although the project as a whole is oriented

towards identifying effective communication and primarily aimed at a

readership of workplace practitioners, Holmes and Stubbe (2003) em-

phasize and explore the relationship between politeness and power and

how both are “instantiated” in a range of discourse settings in the work-

place. Drawing on more than one theoretical/methodological model

(mainly critical discourse analysis, politeness theory and ethnography),

the authors put forward a multidimensional analysis of workplace in-

teraction which covers a range of topics and genres, i. e., meetings, re-

quests/directives, small talk, humour, negotiation, miscommunication.

Perhaps their most important conclusion for a readership concerned

with politeness research is that “the discourse strategies which character-

ize a particular interaction express not only the specific goals of the

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges 11

interaction and the relative roles of each participant in relation to those

goals; they also actively construct the particular relationships between

the people involved, in terms of social distance or solidarity � the polite-

ness norms � as well as the participants’ relative power in the organiza-

tion” (Holmes and Stubbe 2003: 178). Holmes and Stubbe are only very

marginally concerned with inter-cultural interaction, i. e., a brief section

on a Maori/Pakeha exchange.

Also of interest is the recent work of Louise Mullany (2003, 2004a,

2004b), who investigated how both male and female managers construct

(and perform) their roles and identities in business meetings. She too

collected a substantial amount of recorded data in the process of com-

pleting two ethnographic case studies, one based in a retail company

and one in a manufacturing company, both in the UK. Her work is

supplemented by personal observation and a number of interviews with

those who participated in the meetings. Although Mullany’s main focus

is on gender, her work inevitably leads her to a concern with both power

and politeness and their relationship in work settings. Mullany also deals

with the role of humour and small talk and how these make a significant

contribution to the construction of both gender and corporate identities.

All the research previously cited is based on recorded natural language

data. This is a significant development, which suggests that the use of

simulated discourse and questionnaires as primary data is no longer a

dominant methodology in the study of politeness in the workplace (e. g.,

Morand 1996; Rogers and Lee-Wong 2003), a trend that demands a

fresh engagement with issues of research design. Moreover, the growing

interest in inter-cultural and cross-cultural analysis adds a further set of

challenges pertaining to the uncritical transfer of Western concepts and

categories to other cultures and languages. We deal with both these con-

cerns in the next three sections.

3. Conceptual challenges

We began this article by noting that perhaps the most pressing issue in

politeness research and one that has exercised two generations of schol-

ars in the social sciences and humanities remains the question of the

nature of politeness phenomena. There is undoubtedly a growing con-

sensus that the view of politeness as an embellishment of social interac-

tion is at best naıve, not least because it consequently tends to define

behaviour that does not conform to expectations as “impolite” or

“rude”. The juxtaposition of (degrees of) polite versus (degrees of) impo-

lite behaviour is clearly an oversimplification. The fact that the ethics

of politeness would seem to explain some important features of human

interaction while excluding others as non-relevant, or, at least, as not

12 Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

easily amenable to inclusion, represents an unsatisfactory state of affairs.

As suggested previously, recent researchers on politeness (Eelen 2001;

Holmes and Stubbe 2003; Mills 2003; Watts 2003), despite their consider-

able differences, would all contend that politeness is most productively

analyzed not as a system or a normative set of prescripts but as a social

practice which is both dynamic and interactive, with variability seen as

a positive component that builds into human communication a capacity

for social and cultural negotiation and change.

Thus the extent to which politeness is normative has recently become

a controversial issue (see Eelen 2001: 121�187 for a recent discussion

of “normativity” in relationship to politeness theory). In Eelen’s view,

politeness should be seen as a significant part of the process of the con-

struction of social reality, whose main tenets are argumentativity, evalu-

ation and discursiveness (Eelen 2001: 247). In this process, for Eelen,

notions such as “norms” are best regarded as “representations rather

than realities, as arguments instead of givens” (Eelen 2001: 247). How-

ever, Eelen goes on to argue that “a theory of politeness should first and

foremost be an examination of politeness1”, (the everyday and common

sense phenomenon of politeness) by means of politeness2 (its “scientific

conceptualization”). Even if we largely accept Eelen’s version of polite-

ness as primarily constructionist, dynamic and negotiated (as we do), it

is possible to argue that the common sense view of politeness (polite-

ness1) still largely perceives politeness as a set of norms and values that

crucially influences the volitional and strategic action of individuals

along with the belief that politeness reflects in verbal and nonverbal

behaviour something of the deep-seated values of individual cultures.

When we interact, therefore, we “do politeness” and much of the time

engage in it, in large measure, unconsciously unless we are faced with

new situations or groups, the norms/values of which we do not know; at

this point we enter the high-risk zone of potentially “impolite” or “rude”

behaviour which is unintended. Most of us can recognize that a mis-

match between cultural values and expectations can cause misunder-

standing or even conflict in intercultural contact situations; a substantial

literature exists on this subject that also looks at the politeness heuristics

of “face” and “face-work” in order to explain what may go wrong when

conflicting “wants” come to the fore (e. g., Ting-Toomey and Kurogi

1998; Ting-Toomey and Oetzel 2001).

This is not to suggest that cultures are homogeneous; sub-cultures and

other groupings can also generate differing evaluations and inter-

pretations of what is polite, or probably more important, impolite be-

haviour. Nor are we suggesting that politeness is identical with certain

linguistic features in particular languages. However, inter-cultural en-

counters may still be, arguably, the ideal settings to explore some of the

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges 13

dynamics of “politeness”; cross-cultural research is also useful in that it

provides insights from within individual cultures that can inform inter-

cultural research projects. A serious difficulty with comparative research

across cultures is that too often categories and constructs that were de-

veloped within a specific cultural domain � and therefore embody the

philosophical and value systems of that domain � are uncritically trans-

ferred to culturally distant environments. Without a process of “transla-

tion” that clarifies the potentially different understandings of the termi-

nology and its conceptual and value import, field researchers will soon

find that their questionnaires or analytical frameworks become unwork-

able. This can be a problem even across apparently similar cultures, e. g.,

within Western Europe. For example, in their field work in Italy, Bar-

giela-Chiappini and Harris (1997) found that a questionnaire developed

and tested within the British context caused a series of misunderstand-

ings in the Italian context where apparently uncontroversial terms such

as “managers” and “management” evoked quite different semantic con-

notations.

While we look forward to more indigenous contributions to the litera-

ture on non-Western communication (e. g., Kim 2002), it may be useful

to consider some of the challenges confronting field researchers engaged

in cross-cultural and intercultural research and using concepts involving

“face” and “politeness” as their analytical categories. It seems to us that

there are at least two sets of distinct but related issues that require criti-

cal engagement: one conceptual and the other methodological in nature.

Of all the problematic concepts that cross/inter-cultural researchers wres-

tle with, the most intractable must be “culture”. Is culture a cognitive

notion or a socially-constructed one? Do people behave like “English”,

or “Chinese” or “Maori” after internalizing cognitive patterns on which

their behaviour is modelled in inter-cultural encounters, or do they real-

ize cultural patterns through social interaction, elaborating intricate rela-

tional webs in real time? Or are these two versions of culture not actually

alternative concepts to one another, as they are often presented, but

complementary? What is the role, if indeed one is possible, for pre-de-

fined sociolinguistic categories such as gender, class and race in the con-

struction of culture(s)? How do we approach cultural heterogeneity?

In some earlier work (Bargiela-Chiappini and Nickerson 2003; Bar-

giela-Chiappini 2004), we looked for intimations of new approaches to

culture in disciplines such as psychology, anthropology and organization

studies and found, quite unsurprisingly, that the pattern is one of varia-

tion, rather than convergence, of perspectives. For example, linguistic

anthropology conflates language and culture in its understanding of

“language as culture” (Duranti 2003, added emphasis). Organization

studies tend to look at culture(s) as a micro-phenomenon located within

14 Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

the organization (Parkin 2000) in contrast with the established tradition

in cross-cultural management that still operates with the problematic

concept of “national cultures” (e. g., Hofstede 2001; but see McSweeney

2002 for a critical appraisal).

It is perhaps from within cultural and cross-cultural research that the

most fruitful challenges to (Western) analytical categories arise. Indige-

nous perspectives have emerged that question the reductionism of West-

ern cognitive thinking and its preference for Cartesian dichotomies (Jing

and Fu 2001; Matsumoto 2001; Oyama et al. 2001; Shi-xu 2002). Much

Eastern philosophy, instead, seems to prefer to encompass, if not recon-

cile, dialectically coexisting opposites (Singelis 2000). In cross-cultural

psychology, defining the relationship between culture and behaviour re-

mains the major theoretical and methodological issue (Kagitcibasi and

Poortinga 2000).

Here relativistic and universalistic positions clash: the former empha-

sizes the uniqueness of phenomena and the context dependency of mean-

ing and interpretation; the latter concentrates on what is common and

can be compared. Rather than underscoring the contrast between these

two perspectives, their complementarity could be exploited by identi-

fying both emic (indigenous) and etic (universal) aspects of behaviour.

Attention to “cultural commonality” as well as to “cultural difference”

should be encouraged (Kagitcibasi and Poortinga 2000) in an attempt to

capture phenomena that straddle the etic and the emic or have different

manifestations in the two dimensions. Face and politeness are two such

phenomena.

This is not the place for a review of the large Anglo-Saxon literature

on politeness research and its burgeoning critique (for a selective over-

view of the critical literature on “face” see Bargiela-Chiappini 2003).

Instead, we would like briefly to outline the original contribution of

Erving Goffman to an understanding of politeness, though Goffman

himself is interested primarily in constructing a theory of social interac-

tion, not politeness. However, in the light of the canonical status ac-

corded to the work of Brown and Levinson until fairly recently, and the

fact that they draw upon Goffman in important and acknowledged

ways, we feel that his distinctive contribution to the analysis of “face”

needs recovering from the more reductionist interpretation of Brown

and Levinson. In the early 1990s, Watts et al. (1992: 6) observed that

studying politeness meant engaging with the social order and the socio-

cultural conventions which dictate appropriate modes of behaviour. The

literature on linguistic politeness, including Brown and Levinson’s work,

has sometimes overlooked the social-embeddedness of “polite behav-

iour”, which has implications for cross-cultural research. The conse-

quences of revisiting politeness as, firstly, the dynamic locus of enabling

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges 15

and constraining functions regulating social behaviour, which is there-

fore best understood within a moral framework of rights and duties

(Werkhofer 1992) are far reaching. Eelen (2001:170), significantly, argues

that, among other things, politeness is an “inherently ethical” phenom-

enon.

Over thirty years ago, in his sociological writings, Goffman elaborated

his notions of face, face-work and face-saving practices against the back-

ground of a complex and problematic understanding of the interactional

order. Influenced by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim and his

work on the religious origins and nature of social activities, in particular

The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915), Goffman understood

social morality as located in social solidarity. In his early ritual metaphor

of society the moral and religious became fused. Although Goffman’s

social actor is strongly individualistic, a reflection of the Anglo-Saxon

values of independence and privacy, his concerns are never exclusively

egocentric. The interdependence dimension of social beings is empha-

sized in the attention that Goffman pays to the values of deference,

demeanour and tact. Since Goffman’s interest is mainly in developing a

theory of social interaction, he does not see face-maintenance as the

objective of the interaction but rather as a condition of it. Therefore,

when he writes about face-saving practices Goffman is in fact concerned

with mapping the “traffic rules of social interactions” (Goffman 1967:

12). In his understanding, acting consistently with “face” is equivalent to

accomplishing “face-work”, a notion that includes verbal and nonverbal

behaviour in mediated or direct encounters. The “ritually delicate ob-

ject” that is Goffman’s ideal social actor protects self and face through

“avoidance processes”, “corrective processes” and “aggressive use of

face-work” (Goffman 1967: 13�14), all actions that aim at self-preserva-

tion. Later on in the same essay, however, Goffman also writes about

“tact”, “reciprocal self-denial”, and “negative bargaining” (bending to

accommodate other interactants), actions that show other-awareness

and concern for the “ritual equilibrium”. When there is conflict, embar-

rassment ensues, which Goffman considers almost as a social illness to

be contained (Goffman 1967: 106). In his analysis of conflict arising

from contrasting organizational principles, he is prepared to see individ-

uals sacrifice their own identities and the encounter, too, in order to

preserve the social order. Face is thus lost through personal embarrass-

ment, but the social structure is maintained; in fact it “gains in elasticity”

(Goffman 1967: 112).

Ultimately, then, even for the individualistic Western self there appears

to be the embarrassing prospect of losing face and submitting to the

shame of interactional breakdown, seemingly in response to a moral

imperative that calls for the safeguard of the social order. In Goffman’s

16 Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

work, politeness is revealed as one of the fundamental principles govern-

ing the delicate equilibrium of the social order, constantly threatened by

the unforeseeable dynamics of social interaction. Goffman’s notion of

“dissonance” refers to verbal or nonverbal acts that go against the sys-

tems of rules, conventions, expectations that govern “appropriate” social

behaviour. In a recent lecture given at the launch of The Journal of Po-liteness Research, Robert Arundale (2005), building critically on Goff-

man’s work, put forward an alternative view of face (to Brown and Lev-

inson’s) as relational and interactional in the following terms, offering a

particular challenge:

In developing an alternative and more culture-general conceptual-

ization of face for a new theory of face-work, I have drawn on an

observation considerably more general than Goffman’s. Namely,

that all humans engage in face-to-face interaction within a matrix

of relationships with other human beings. From the perspective of

human communication, interaction in relationships appears basic

to explaining human sociality. Given this particular observational

and theoretical framing, one needs to ask if the alternative view of

face as interactional and relational is a culturally bounded concep-

tualization? Of course it is. No human construction can be other-

wise … More culture-general conceptualizations are possible, how-

ever, so long as they are derived in dialectical interplay with culture-

specific instantiations … Therein lies the challenge for new concep-

tualizations of face.

The fact that face and politeness seem interwoven in the fabric of social

life � and may in fact form its very canvas � and that the prospect of

the demise of “civil discourse” (Kingwell, 1993: 404) could lead to the

possible collapse of (many levels of) the interactional equilibrium would

seem to provide support for the thesis of the universality of politeness.

While it is indefensible to suggest that the patterns of use of certain

linguistic forms make one society intrinsically more polite than another,

it is probably fair to assume that all societies have some version of norms

that define “polite behaviour”; in this sense, politeness is universal, al-

though the norms underlying it may vary and may be open to dispute in

different contexts (Meier 1995). Indeed, these “norms” are almost cer-

tainly difficult to identify with any degree of precision and may well be

related to “communities of practice”, especially within complex cultures

and societies. The concept of “communities of practice” derives from

Wenger’s (1998) work where he characterizes communities of practice

primarily as a group of people who have been engaged in a common set

of tasks over a period of time and, hence, experience a sense of “mutual

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges 17

engagement”, “a joint enterprise” and “a shared repertoire” (Wenger

1998: 73), which includes sets of discourse practices as well as “shared

histories of learning” (Wenger 1998: 103). Wenger’s ethnographic field-

work for the book was undertaken in a workplace setting, i. e., a medical

claims producing centre operated by a large American insurance com-

pany. Since the book was published, the concept of communities of prac-

tice has been extended and modified considerably (particularly in rela-

tionship to gender), and Mills (2003:195�197) provides an insightful and

comprehensive discussion of this work. The notion of communities of

practice has seldom been associated with cross-cultural analyses, al-

though we shall refer again later to researchers who seem implicitly to

be working towards a similar concept.

Cross-cultural analyses of politeness probably need to develop, first of

all, emic notions of “polite behaviour” which in turn must be carefully

considered in terms of comparability before they are deemed to be useful

for field research. The preference for isolated speech acts should be re-

placed by (or at least embedded in) the analysis of exchanges clearly

located in the arena of social interaction (Meier 1995) where goals, inter-

ests, ends, motivations are played out. The workplace, in particular,

comprises a substratum of deep-rooted beliefs and conceptualizations

about the world and human relations that are drawn upon by the in-

teractants. Awareness of the invisible layers of cultural meanings con-

structing the broader context of business interactions is crucial to avoid

imposing arbitrary etic interpretations. A study of business relations in

Taiwan (Chang and Holt 1996) demonstrates how interpersonal relation-

ships are built through emotional work as a means for achieving the

instrumental goals of the interaction. On the other hand, by looking at

linguistic exchanges only in inter/cross-cultural analyses we run the risk

of missing the “bigger picture” which is the key to a fuller interpretation.

More emic research is needed, especially in non-Anglophone societies,

which integrates cultural beliefs and norms as part of the linguist’s inter-

pretative toolkit. In work and organizational settings, local normative

and belief systems are often operational and emanate from the history

of the firm or the company, and these give rise to a distinctive com-

munity of practice which provides a further crucial dimension for

analysis.

4. Methodologies: The collection and analysis of data

Work environments present specific challenges to researchers: issues of

access, confidentiality, feedback expectations, time and relationship

management may affect the formulation of the analytical framework and

the choice of methods for data collection. For example, a qualitative

18 Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

study of corporate interaction that relies on non-participant observation

and recordings will need formal approval at the highest levels within the

organization, which cannot be taken for granted. Although longitudinal

studies are always preferable to ad-hoc visits to the workplace, the re-

sources invested in creating and maintaining relations with partners in

companies and other workplace settings cannot be underestimated.

Field researchers wishing to observe and analyze the manifestations of

politeness in the workplace can choose from a range of methodologies.

Researcher choice depends on several factors such as: the inclination of

the researcher in terms of his or her ontological and epistemological

assumptions; the specific object of the research; the terms of access to

and residence in the field negotiated by the researcher; the nature of the

interactions being observed and/or recorded. Issues of sensitivity and

confidentiality can impose serious constraints on methodological

choices. For instance, action research � that is, qualitative, participative

methodologies which pursue research and change at the same time �would not be either feasible or appropriate in analyzing boardroom

meetings, unless the researcher also happened to be acting as a consul-

tant for the company.

Where a high degree of involvement is possible, and advisable, herme-

neutics, participative ethnography and action research guarantee the

closest possible contact with interactants and their workplace activities

through full immersion and a high degree of involvement in the work

context. These methodologies rely on the experiential openness of the

researcher to learning from and in the field. Bargiela-Chiappini and

Nickerson (2003:7) suggest critical hermeneutics as an analytic approach

to intercultural business communication. The attractiveness of herme-

neutics (defined by the OED as “the art or science of interpretation”)

sees interaction as a dialogic relationship embedded in a historical tradi-

tion (Roy and Starosta 2001). One of the best known figures in the

hermeneutic tradition, the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer1

in his opus Truth and Method discusses the central importance of lan-

guage (as discourse) in the hermeneutical experience. The development

of a common language is instrumental to “conversation” as “a process

of two people understanding each other … it is characteristic of every

true conversation that each opens himself to the other person, truly ac-

cepts his point of view as worthy of consideration and gets inside the

other to such an extent that he understands not a particular individual,

but what he says” (Gadamer 1975: 347). The “understanding” that is

implied here goes beyond representation or even re-presentation. It is

not a private, interior activity between a text and its interpreter. It is

a “practical-moral activity” that is dependent on the self and on self-

examination (Schwandt 1999). The dialogue with the “Other” from an

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges 19

unfamiliar culture, be it a geographically-remote culture or simply a dif-

ferent professional culture (viz. corporate or institutional management),

also poses challenging ontological and epistemological questions for the

analysis of intercultural business discourse.

In participative or participant ethnography the tension between reflex-

ivity and positivism is negotiated in the methodological duality of a “re-

flexive science”, “which elevates dialogue as its defining principle and

intersubjectivity between participant and observer as its premise” (Bura-

woy 1998: 14). As a consequence of participation-intervention, power

relations are problematized: domination, silencing, objectification and

normalization are the power effects identified by Burawoy as emerging

from his extended case-study of the Zambian copper industry in the

1970s. Burawoy argues that the ethnographer cannot avoid dominating

and being dominated and is often engaged in power struggles with peo-

ple in the field: the existing dominant ideologies marginalize discordant

voices; social forces will tend to be treated as external and natural; com-

plex situations are “made to fit” into categories that can be investigated

(Burawoy 1998: 23�4). All these issues are inherent in organizational

ethnography where the researchers are engaged in a constant process of

subtle re-negotiation of their own identity and position in the field as

the research progresses (Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris 1997).

The personal involvement of the researcher with the “object” of the

research is one of the criteria that identifies hermeneutical research and

is also the source of criticism of subjectivity and lack of rigour. Immer-

sion in the field and high degree of involvement often characterizes the

work of the organizational ethnographer, especially if she is a participant

observer (Cameron et al. 1992; Watson 2000, 2001). Combined with ac-

tion research, participative ethnography demands the researcher’s en-

gagement on two, or sometimes even three, fronts (Reason and Torbert

2001). Reflexivity, or critical subjectivity is the distinctive feature of first-

person research: “first-person ‘downstream’ research/practice can in-

volve critical examination of day-to-day behaviour, drawing on qualities

of mindfulness and self-awareness to notice critically the impact of one’s

actions in the wider world” (Reason and Torbert, 2001: 17�8). Co-oper-ative inquiry is the best example of “second-person research”, where a

group of between six and twenty co-researchers (and co-subjects) engage

in cycles of action and reflection. Clearly, first- and second-person re-

search tend to co-exist and in fact augment one another when researchers

work collaboratively and are prepared to be challenged by findings and

colleagues as the project unfolds. Finally, in third-person research, con-

stituencies may become engaged in the inquiry who are not personally

known to the researchers but whom the researchers may seek to em-

power (Reason and Torbert 2001: 23�4).

20 Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

The first two types of ethnographic methodologies, reflexive/critical

subjective and cooperative enquiry, are suited to politeness researchers

working both as individuals or in teams. Such methodologies assume

patterns of collaborative research based on dialogue with the managers,

professionals or other workers on site. In fact, in collaborative organiza-

tional research, the process of learning from the practitioners through

reflexive dialoguing relies on the researchers learning the “language” of

managerial praxis (Martensson and Lee 2004). Dialogue as “an open

and … heterogeneous interplay of multiple and polyphonic voices in

continuous tension … a struggle for understanding and for creating

something new” (Markova 2001: 127) captures some of the dynamism

of the “researcher-researched” communication; the inherently antinomic

nature of dialogue keeps the communication alive. Studies of organiza-

tional discourse tend to be dominated by theoretical approaches, even

though communicative practices in business and institutions are central

to their survival and inherently discourse-based. On this point, Heath et

al. (2004: 354) observe that “workplace studies powerfully demonstrate

how the fine details of interaction lie at the heart of a broad range of

organizational activities, and that discourse, talk and interaction are em-

bedded in the material environment”. What many of these studies are

engaging in is essentially a community of practices approach, although

this is usually implicit. As Wenger’s notion of communities of practice

has been modified by Mills and others in order to enhance its relevance

to gender studies, so the analysis of communicative practices in business

and other organizations might be further enhanced through a more ex-

plicit development and application of Wenger’s insights.

Closer to home, sociolinguists, anthropological linguists, conversation

analysts and those working within pragmatics in their different ways

accord varying degrees of pre-eminence to the role of language (or dis-

course) in their analyses. Setting aside for the moment the substantive

epistemological differences that distinguish their respective methodolo-

gies, they all tend to perceive language as predominantly social action

and to view its interactive enactment as the primary analytical focus for

politeness research in the workplace. In an interesting comparison of

five different approaches (conversation analysis, interactional analysis,

discursive psychology, politeness theory, critical discourse analysis) to

discourse analysis, Stubbe et al. (2003) convincingly illustrate some of

the challenges facing multi-method research. Using an extract involving

an encounter between a male senior public service manager and a less

senior female policy analyst recorded for the Wellington Language in

the Workplace Project previously referred to, Stubbe and colleagues

highlight both the different theoretical assumptions underpinning the

approaches and the implications of these for a qualitative analysis. Both

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges 21

commonalities and differences are highlighted, though politeness theory

is illustrated by a largely uncritical version of Brown and Levinson

(1987). Ideally, the resultant analysis would draw on the attention to

conversational detail exemplified by conversation analysis and interac-

tion analysis, the sensitivity to psychological and sociological variables

that politeness theory and discursive psychology offer and the critical

awareness and social engagement of critical discourse analysis, and, in

fact, the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project does draw pro-

ductively on a range of methodologies and modes of analysis.

The multi-method approach that would be required to capture all

these dimensions in a single analytical framework seems to call for brico-lage research. This has been developed as a reaction to the strictures of

reductionism, an invitation “to learn a variety of ways of seeing and

interpreting in the pursuit of knowledge” (Kincheloe 2001: 682). At the

other end of the methodological spectrum, we witness the ongoing de-

bate on the dangers of subjective judgement in qualitative methodology.

The practice of creating new analytical categories for data that do not

seem to be explicable by existing categories has been criticized as a liberal

attitude that goes against the precepts of scientific research (Clarke 2004:

42). However, it seems to us that a desirable multiperspectival approach

to politeness research in the workplace can only flourish within multidis-

ciplinary contact, where insights from cognate disciplines (and beyond)

are exchanged dialectically. This process is bound to generate new cross-

disciplinary interpretative categories that integrate or simply supersede

discipline-specific ones. The issue of rigour arises here and not only in

connection with methodologies: different ontological and epistemologi-

cal assumptions characterize diverse disciplines that could conceivably

contribute to politeness research in the workplace. The research brico-leurs of the future are reminded that “knowledge is always in process,

developing, culturally-specific, and power-inscribed” (Kincheloe 2001:

689).

5. Cross- and inter-cultural research in politeness

Cross-cultural politeness research often calls into question deep-seated

ontological assumptions, not only those having to do with methodolo-

gies and disciplines but also with concepts, the equivalence of which

cannot be assumed when dealing with different philosophical systems.

The semantics of individuality is a case in point. The concept of “individ-

uality” was imported to modern China from the West along with the

attendant terminology (Moeller 2004); there it was confronted with the

Confucian notion of the communal self, which in cross -cultural social

22 Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

psychology is causing a re-consideration of the simplistic Western dimen-

sions of individualism and collectivism (Triandis 1995).

If the literatures on cross-cultural psychology and cross-cultural man-

agement are anything to go by, one would be forgiven for thinking that

inter-cultural encounters almost inevitably create discomfort, stress and

the likelihood of failure. Far from celebrating cultural difference as an

opportunity (Montouri and Fahim 2004), the impression one gathers

from many cross national studies of values and perceptions of managers

and executives is that of inter-personal and inter-group struggle. Empiri-

cal research suggests that cultural diversity undermines the cohesiveness

of work teams (van der Zee et al. 2004); Indian values interfere with

efficient and effective Western-style business negotiation (Kumar 2004);

and positive and negative stereotyping among Israeli and Indian manag-

ers has an impact on business relations and outcomes (Zaidman 2000).

Practical solutions range from using “impression management” instead

of assertiveness in intercultural encounters (Pacquiao 2000), promoting

“adaptive selling” to improve perceived inter-cultural competence (Bush

et al. 2001), developing competencies for managers in charge of a multi-

cultural workforce (Chang and Tharenou 2004), and learning from

transnational companies on how to deal with “multiple cultures” (Søde-

berg and Holden 2002).

Often, comparative sociological analysis is also modelled on exported

Western constructs and findings (Smelser 2003: 648). The combination

of multidisciplinarity and comparative research adds a further layer of

research questions and issues for researchers, which have emerged from

within, among others, cross-cultural management, intercultural com-

munication and cultural psychology. There is agreement that Western-

style research based on cross-cultural comparisons needs to pay atten-

tion to the expectations of the field. In East Asian contexts, in particular,

researchers need to attend to the development and maintenance of trust

among the participants as well as fostering a flexible and patient attitude

in the long process of forming relationships which in many cultures are

instrumental to the achievement of the research objectives (Vallaster

2000). For example, an understanding of the norms and values underly-

ing highly face-sensitive inter-cultural encounters is a pre-requisite for

an improved success rate in Western-Chinese negotiations (Faure 1998),

and references to Confucian philosophy and values have become com-

monplace in the literature on cross/intercultural business communica-

tion.

The cognitive role of affect is one of the most important contributions

to pragmatics from non-Cartesian (non dualistic) approaches to cogni-

tion such as discursive psychology, social constructionism and distrib-

uted cognition. It has been forcefully argued that “[t]he integration of

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges 23

affect/emotion and pragmatics is the first and most important step

towards a holistic framework or theory for analyzing linguistic data in

context” (Kopytko 2004: 522). Drawing from cognitive science, artificial

intelligence and linguistics, Kopytko constructs a powerful defence of

emotions as essential in explaining social behaviour. Within Relational

Pragmatics (RP), cognition and emotion dissolve in a continuum of non-

discrete, fuzzy affective events ranging between cognitive-based to non-

cognitive-based events. Interactants monitor their own emotions, others’

emotions and the perceptions of their own emotions by others (Kopytko

2004: 536). Given that interactions are emotionally very complex, in-

teractants will ignore contextual cues and attempt to simplify them,

hence overgeneralizing, overreacting and jumping to conclusions. Ko-

pytko challengingly argues that “affective texts” � be they linguistically

coded like discussions, disputes or quarrels, or observable through para-

linguistics � “say and reveal more about the current situation than do

the linguistic ones” (Kopytko 2004: 538). Even texts not readily associ-

ated with emotions (scientific, legal, economic) can be defined as “affec-

tive”. Affect is ubiquitous; it is socially constructed and distributed and

is involved in linguistic choices at all levels, from phonetic/phonological

through to pragmatic/stylistic (Kopytko 2004: 539). Emotions in interac-

tions are modulated by social and cultural norms, power relations, gen-

der, age etc.; “affective rights” of interactants are also socially depend-

ent. Finally, “affect management” takes place whenever interactants face

emergent emotional events, control their own emotions, strategically use

affect and attempt to regulate affective events (Kopytko 2004: 539). (See

Samra-Fredericks (2004) for an engaging ethnographic account of busi-

ness executives “doing emotions” during strategy meetings).

Clyne (2002) remarks that contrastive pragmatic analysis has domi-

nated the field of cross-linguistic research until the early 1990s but has

led to no substantive theoretical development. Methods used in past re-

search have ranged from the collection of large corpora of recorded

spontaneous interaction to role-play, interviews and participant observa-

tion. Clyne goes on to list a number of aspects of discourse that have

been studied in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural contexts: speech act

realization, discourse organization, modes of address, choice of channel,

linguistic creativity (“language play” and humour), honorific systems,

small talk, intonation patterns, negotiation of communication break-

down, interactional patterns (e. g., turn-taking and silence). The chal-

lenges faced by researchers wishing to embrace cross-cultural pragmatics

have been discussed in articles looking at data collection methods (Beebe

and Clark Cummings 1995), speech acts (Cohen 1995) and inter-lan-

guage data (Hartford and Bardovi-Harlig 1992).

24 Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

Pragmatics is particularly suited to chart the dynamics of crosslinguis-

tic contact because pragmatics is firmly embedded in culture (Mey 2004:

45). In order to capture the fact that “pragmatics is just as much about

the limitations as about the options that are inherent in a situation”,

Mey proposes the analytical concept of the “pragmatic act”, where it is

the “situation” that gives the speech act its meaning. Unlike Istvan Kec-

skes’ “situation-bound utterances”, (Kecskes 2000, cited in Mey 2004:

38), which are linked to specific purposes or tasks, a pragmatic act “has

many behavioural and situational components” and “can actively create

a situation to fit itself” (Mey 2004: 38�45).

The analyst is still left with the ambitious task of discerning the com-

ponents within the interaction, not relying exclusively on one set of prag-

matic assumptions but foregrounding the distinctive pragmatics of the

languages in interaction and also displaying sensitivity to the dynamics

of the unfolding pragmatics of the specific inter-cultural situation. This

twofold engagement acknowledges the fact that the “pragmatic acts”

which inform the interaction will define new pragmatic rules of com-

municative engagement.

Intercultural pragmatics stands to make a significant contribution to

the analysis of politeness in intercultural business interactions. The initial

volume of the new journal Intercultural Pragmatics proposes a method-

ologically and epistemologically advanced approach to the study of the

“intercultural”. According to Mey (2004: 28): “intercultural pragmatics

as a field of research and as an area of practice can contribute to a way

out of the dilemma of building a bridge between the two extreme posi-

tions: safeguarding the culture-as-culture while attending to the needs of

the users”. Culture flourishes as situated human practice: removing it

from its local conditions or from its dependence on the human usually

results in its demise. When cultures come in contact, acculturation or

assimilation often take place unless the (usually) minority cultures

choose to index their distinctiveness: language is a defining element of

this distinctiveness, though non-verbal features (such as dress) can be

equally powerful.

As a way to capture the situatedness of intercultural pragmatics, Bar-

giela-Chiappini (2004) proposes a dynamic construct and perspective

that seeks to capture culture in the making: “interculturality”. The onto-

logical fluidity built into interculturality interrogates ethnocentric (i. e.,

mostly Western) and individualistic perspectives on self, exclusively cog-

nitive explanations for interpersonal relations and national culture as an

analytical category. In turn, interculturality requires a review of funda-

mental constructs such as discourse, culture, and context. These cannot

be fixed within tight definitional boundaries; their influence on theoreti-

cal and meta-theoretical development in intercultural business discourse

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges 25

derives from their interplay with disciplines other than linguistics. Ac-

cording to the interpretative tradition, which includes critical hermeneu-

tics, culture cannot be captured in neat, pre-defined social categories,

although, interestingly, “prejudices” (in the Gadamerian sense of the pre-

existing “tradition” from which the self emerges) can be thought of as

pre-existing influences. Culture as practice emerging from multimodal in-teraction affords enough ontological latitude to accommodate novel in-

sights from linguistic anthropology.

Negotiation and accommodation in the dialogic construction of inter-

cultural space confront three overlapping dimensions of context: social,

linguistic and cognitive. Researchers, practitioners, professionals within

the interactional space are all contextualizing agents (Sarangi and

Candlin 2001), and their activity is far from neutral as they become

“embroiled” in local power struggles and politics. For purposes of analy-

sis, a high degree of contextualization is crucial. The relevant details are

those that enable participants (including observing analysts) to make

sense of the interaction, hence the importance of collaborative inter-

pretation, especially in intercultural business encounters affected as they

are by competing “values”, “roles” and “prejudices”. Rather than depict-

ing the cultural Other as an obstacle to understanding and intercultural

interaction as the locus of inevitable conflict and struggle, it is more

productive for intercultural pragmatics to take note of the developments

in social and cultural psychology and cross-cultural communication that

query the ethnocentricity of much earlier research and the persistence of

Western stereotyping within widely used analytical categories.

6. Towards interdisciplinarity

We have argued that the study of politeness at work necessarily calls for

both multidisciplinarity research and multimethod approaches. An early

example of the recognition of the need to bring together multidiscipli-

nary research in a single volume is Hywel Coleman’s (1989) Workingwith Language: A Multidisciplinary Consideration of Language Use inWork Contexts. Sarangi and Robert’s Talk, Work and Institutional Order:Discourse in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings, published ten

years later in 1999, demonstrates how much ground has been covered

in the intervening period, though the authors argue that the need for

multidisciplinarity and the application of different analytical frameworks

in order to increase our understanding of workplace communication is,

if anything, even greater:

Just as “workplace” is not easily defined, so it is also no longer

possible to identify work based studies with one or two obvious

disciplines … Such is the nature of discipline boundary-marking

26 Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris

that “communication” in the workplace is claimed by different dis-

cipline groups as their terrain. Even what counts as a “workplace”

is an inter-disciplinary dispute (Sarangi and Roberts 1999: 5).

There is now an equally pressing need for scholars to come together to

discuss the possibility of collaborative research that will be able to count

on pooled resources and team effort. The development of distinct disci-

plines, particularly in recent years, is traceable not only to advances in

knowledge but also to the demand for specialist skills required by a more

complex, technological society, and the number of new disciplines and

sub-disciplines seems to have massively increased. The opposing trend,

towards interdisciplinarity, is motivated by the search for a “total knowl-

edge” and the questioning of the nature of knowledge itself, a twofold

response to problems and issues that cannot be addressed by individual

disciplines (Moran 2002), whose boundaries have become ever more

“fuzzy”. Whereas in multidisciplinarity discrete disciplines co-exist

within a relationship of proximity, interdisciplinarity is transformative

and generative of new forms of knowledge (Moran 2002: 16). There are

a large number of very real obstacles to effective multidisciplinary re-

search, including the mutual unintelligibility of disciplinary languages,

competence-related constraints, issues of method and epistemology, and

finally, challenges surrounding the assessment and the evaluation of the

research and its dissemination. We would confidently claim, nonetheless,

that politeness research is already, in important ways, multidisciplinary,

although one cannot always take for granted cross-fertilization between

input disciplines and analytical findings.

It is, arguably, in the field of comparative analyses of politeness across

cultures that the seeds could be sown for an interdisciplinary future;

indeed, it has been suggested that “proper comparative analysis forces

us to be interdisciplinary” (Smelser 2002: 653). Interdisciplinarity, how-

ever, is almost always a messy endeavour and a difficult one to realize

due to the constraints on acquiring multidisciplinary knowledge within

an individual career span. Part of the attractiveness of interdisciplinarity

to the postmodern researcher is its questioning of claims of scientific

objectivity and neutrality. This premise alone is unlikely to destabilize

disciplines which are “as much a product of institutional and economic

pragmatism as they are of intellectual justification” (Moran 2002: 186).

Pragmatic interdisciplinarity represents “a way of living with the disci-

plines more critically and self-consciously, recognizing that their most

basic assumptions can always be challenged and reinvigorated by new

ways of thinking from elsewhere” (Moran 2002: 187), and nowhere is

this more evident and important than in research which centres on the

workplace.

Politeness at work: Issues and challenges 27

7. Future directions for research

Researchers should seek to explore further the implications and contri-

bution of “politeness research” to the theoretical and empirical develop-

ment of intra/inter/cross-cultural communication at work. To this end,

they need to: (1) address the issue of what constitutes polite (and impo-

lite) behaviour in specific workplace settings and how such behaviour

relates to organizational/institutional norms and practices and to wider

concepts of politeness; (2) seek to collect and analyze a much wider

range of empirical data involving interaction in both inter- and intra-

cultural workplace settings; and (3) consider the implications of the find-

ings of politeness research for the training of business and professional

people in communication and other skills, especially in inter-cultural en-

counters.

Note1. A dedicated website is available at www.svcc.edu/academics/classes/gadamer/

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