Item Details

The persistence of workplace ideology and identity across communicative contexts

Issue: Vol 3 No. 1 (2006) JAL Vol 3, No 1 (2006)

Journal: Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice

Subject Areas: Writing and Composition Linguistics

DOI: 10.1558/japl.v3i1.1

Abstract:

We examine the discursive construction of organizational ideology, its role in sustaining membership in a workplace community, and the achievement of community cohesion in a workplace environment through the practice and reinforcement of communicative norms and identities that reflect this ideology. Using a range of spoken and written discourse examples from internal employee listservs, company documents, ethnographic interviews, and participant observation over a continuous four-year period during a time of rapid change at a small U.S. software development firm, we articulate interactional processes by which community membership and organizational alignments are conceptualized, established, challenged, and sustained in the day-to-day physical workplace and the concurrent online sphere. The longitudinal dimension demonstrates how the adoption and interpretation of the firm’s organizational ideology, which contributes to the formation and maintenance of its identity as an occupational community, persists across time and channels of transmission.

Author: Colleen Cotter, Daniel Marschall

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