Volume 31, Issue 3

Taking its point of departure in ten semi-structured interviews with ten members of staff in a Danish-owned, cross-border software company, Softia, this article analyzes how members of staff talk about and make sense of ways of “doing culture” in a corporate context. The article adopts a discourse analytical perspective and applies systemic functional grammar in order to identify the characteristics of three major discursive constructions which members of staff draw on interchangeably, and to a greater and lesser extent, to give expression to their intercultural practices in Softia. This text-focused, practitioneroriented, discursive approach provides valuable insights into the practitioners' understandings of intercultural practices, and, therefore, offers a welcome contribution to the ever-growing, but less text-focused, literature on intercultural business communication and cross-cultural management.

This paper explores how attention to the talk of television viewers might provide a methodological addition to tools used for exploring language ideologies and the nexus between action, structure, and meaning. My empirical focus is the talk of a group of Indonesians who, while watching an Indonesian soap opera, engage in discussions about the meanings of an unfamiliar word. In addition to adding further support to discussions about the multiple, situated, and active construction of meaning, I show how the social domain of one meaning widens over interactional time while also showing how contestations over the meanings of this word provide insights into these participants' ideologies about sign usage and users.

Politeness is a pervasive aspect of communication and plays an important part in all our interactions (see, e.g., Brown and Levinson, Politeness: Some universals in language usage, Cambridge University Press, 1987). Communication in the military is no exception. The differences which exist are examined in this article by observing interactions in a US army battalion. The main focus is the language used in office situations based on a questionnaire filled out by members of the battalion, interviews, and several days of field study. The interpretation and analysis of these data detail how military personnel is supposed to and does deal with both superiors and subordinates in a variety of speech act situations, such as how directives and complaints are formulated, how criticism is voiced, and how advice is given to superiors, peers, and subordinates. The results show that respectful behavior, on the one hand, is prescribed by regulations and institutions and, on the other hand, it is shaped by the individual's creativity and an informal and familiar style. Thus, the military in non-combat office situations has its peculiarities in language use in such areas as rank, but also makes use of typical features of workplace talk such as the mitigation of directives.

The interpretation of ironic texts in this article is based on informants' responses to authentic texts. This approach is illustrated with a set of responses to a (potentially ironic) letter to the editor published in a major Finnish newspaper. Ironic interpretation is seen as being crucially dependent on coherence. Texts that are perceived as incoherent can result in an ironic interpretation, if the incoherence is also perceived as being intentional, and intentionality in turn is a sign of the edge of the ironist. On the basis of the analysis of informants' responses, ironic interpretation is defined as a combination of five factors: (1) an ironic edge that (2) reflects the intention of the ironist, and (3) has a target and (4) a victim, too. Essential to irony is factor (5): one or more of factors 1–4 must be inferred from co(n)text. This definition of irony is crucial in distinguishing irony from non-irony, and it helps to discern the differences as well as the similarities between irony and related phenomena.

This paper draws on the notion of activity type to analyze the sociopragmatics of sharing. It shows that sharing has acquired the status of a culturally salient activity, where it frames the ways in which individuals are expected to interact with one another. The data to be discussed are organized into two sets. The first set of data focuses on sharing as a personal and voluntary activity, and it largely supports the claims of the extended reflexivity thesis. That is, the activity of sharing allows individuals to fall back on resources such as the personal experiences of others in order to navigate a variety of social dilemmas, or even to simply create a sense of community. The second set of data looks at sharing as an institutionalized activity, and shows how, once institutionalized as “sharing sessions,” sharing can actually serve as a technology of governmentality. It imposes significant constraints on the social identities of individuals, who are thereby obligated to share in ways that support the institutional goals.