A review of Culture, Discourse, and The Workplace by Jo Angouri, published by Routledge, 2018

“As companies move from a top-down to a horizontal structure, where the emphasis is on the performance of the team, new communication contexts and needs emerge” (Angouri 51). Jo Angouri’s 2018 Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace works to integrate its audience into the historical and theoretical framework within which sociolinguistics has been developing for the past quarter-century. This text focuses mainly on the expanding definition of “culture,” and should not be taken as one’s first foray into linguistics. Angouri works here to express a series of matter-of-fact points (which will be briefly explored in the following paragraphs), intended to change how a reader thinks. This text is set to redefine Workplace and culture, Workplace as a nation, and culture in general, among a few other broad scale topics. And while it is a bit dated (tackling a topic [the Workplace] that so immensely changed two years after this text was published [in 2020, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic]), Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace does have a bit to offer if it is taken as a supplemental reading to one’s other studies or interests. 

I offer the idea that Angouri’s Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace must be consumed as advanced or supplemental reading, meant to be done by an academic or a scholar. I pose this idea because of the immense barrier to entry that this text poses. There is a menagerie of undefined terms flung free within this text that a reader is expected to have pre-defined in their mind. Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace does not offer very many arguments; instead, Angouri’s text works to provide a compound history of post-1990s sociolinguistics culture (and there is a ton of merit here). Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace is, at its core, a textual response to sociolinguistics giants. Angouri calls upon names such as James Paul Gee, Jonathan Morris, and Pierre Bourdieu while creating her response. This broad sociolinguistic response reads as if it were composed as a dissertation; it was not – Jo Angouri is an accomplished academic author (and Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace was her seventh academic text [either edited or authored]). There is little voice inline within this text, however, which allows for an assortment of facts to be succinctly poured out into a reader’s mind. 

Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace is divided into three parts, which are then divided further into nine figures. The first part, “A prismatic view of culture,” discusses how certain relevant sociolinguistics terms came into being and begins to outline the central focus of Angouri’s overarching text, that the Workplace itself contains a culture, similar to a nation (and that the Workplace culture has certain integral parts). While not centered as an argument, this book does work to convey new ideas (for example, “Culture Shock” [what one experiences when one is new to an environment/culture] as an integral part of the culture experienced in the Workplace). Angouri conveys these ideas in a matter-of-fact way, calling upon all manner of in-text citation. 

The second part within Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace, “Doing research in intercultural professional settings,” details the history of how research has been conducted in sociolinguistics. In her text, Angouri even goes so far as to define “Ethonography.” Angouri provides “tricks of the trade” for conducting research, but does not conduct any research of her own, instead analyzing past created research and providing the history behind particular landmark studies.

The third part within Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace, “Doing culture and identity in workplace interaction,” was the part that I found the most interesting. This segment began to dive deep into the ways in which culture and identity are integrally intertwined and those ways in which they relate to the Workplace. This section began to explore how one’s identity could change as a result of their workplace (a main theme of Angouri’s text).

This third segment of Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace called upon many of sociolinguistic scholar Gee’s views on identity (this is certainly intentional, as Gee is referenced throughout Angouri’s text). Particularly, Gee’s “Four ways to view identity” came to mind while reading Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace. This concept, originally from an article titled “Identity as an Analytic Lens for Research in Education,” published in 2001 in the twenty-fifth volume of the Review of Research in Education, essentially describes four processes and powers by which one’s identity can be constructed (outlined below):

Nature/State (an example from “Identity as an Analytic Lens for Research in Education:” “Being an identical twin is a state that I am in, not anything that I have done or accomplished. The source of this state-the “power” that determines it or to which I am ‘subject’ is a force [in this case, genes] over which I had no control” [Gee 101]; I’ve explained Nature identities briefly so that they can be used in comparison to Institution identities). Institution/Position (an example from “Identity as an Analytic Lens for Research in Education”: “[…]one way of looking at ‘who I am,’ that I am a professor in a university. Being a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is a position. It is not something that nature gave me or anything I could accomplish by myself” [Gee 102].) Discourse (which, despite sharing in name with the title of Angouri’s text, is not majorly important to Angouri’s Workplace examinations), and Affinity, (an example from “Identity as an Analytic Lens for Research in Education”: “The fourth perspective on identity I call the affinity perspective [or A-Identities]. Here I will take the example of someone who is a Star Trek fan in the sense and way the people portrayed in the movie Trekkies are […] They may share little besides their interest in, say, Star Trek.” [Gee 105]). 

A-identities and Institution/Position identities (or I-identities) repeatedly came into my mind while reading Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace.

Angouri highlights specific examples of company culture within her text; one such example comes from the 2014 McDonald’s internal company website:

At McDonald’s we are moving from awareness to action. Our goal is to have people within our organization working and living to reach their full potential. We believe that leaders hold themselves accountable for learning about, valuing, and respecting individuals on both sides of the counter. At McDonald’s, diversity, and inclusion are part of our culture – from the crew room to the Board Room. We are working to achieve this goal every day by creating an environment for everyone to contribute their best.

The above example highlights aspects of both I-identities (most individuals who participate in Workplace culture can mark that excerpt of their self as an I-identity), and A-identities – individuals who work at McDonald’s, for example, may not share anything in common with each other, besides the fact that they are, in fact, employed by the conglomerate fast-food chain, McDonald’s. These connections are examples of the things that one may learn while reading Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace.

Angouri spends time discussing the biases implicit within the modern Workplace (and by the modern Workplace, I generally mean the modern [post 1990s] workspaces that the middle class inhabits – from the fast-food restaurant to the office complex). Her words are built upon the studies and research conducted before her. While reading this text, though, I thought that there were clear gaps of authorial bias laid out in Angouri’s writing. Even though Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace is written in a point-blank, matter-of-fact style, Angouri’s opinion still sneaks into this text, and her biases begin to resemble those that recent sociolinguist scholars preface being aware of. Sociolinguistics scholar Sarah J. Shin published a text in 2018 (Bilingualism in Schools and Society) dismantling and explaining certain biases that occurred in sociolinguistics and the larger world. These biases, which Shin focused on, have to do with race, bilingualism, and culture. Some of the biases that Shin talks about pertaining to culture sneak their way into Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace. For example, one of Shin’s core biases within chapter one of her text is that “[American] Immigrants are reluctant to learn English” (Shin 3). This bias sneaks its way into multiple segments of Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace. Specifically, Angouri poses the idea that immigrants in the United States may have difficulty homogenizing with a certain workplace because of their lack of English proficiency and reluctance to assimilate. She discusses the difficulty of defending homogenization: “In the 21st century business context, it is ever more difficult to defend the idea of ‘homogeneity’ of countries […];” however, her implicit bias remains apparent (Angouri 20). This, too, is something to be aware of while reading Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace.

I believe that Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace is a text that was ultimately worth reading in 2018, if one was diving deep into sociolinguistics and the Workplace; however, much of the text’s principal purpose became immediately outdated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The world that Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace was written in no longer exists. After publishing Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace, Jo Angouri would move on to conduct a research study titled “Can you Speak Covid-19,” in part researching the changes in Workplace caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In an essay, co-written by Jo Angouri, titled “Can you Speak Covid-19? Languages and Social Inequality in Management Studies,” from the Journal of Management Studies, the idea that sociolinguistics need to focus on the future appears as a focal point: “We challenge existing assumptions, concepts, and practices and propose directions to guide future scholarship in this area of study […] The pandemic and its social and economic reverberations reveal novel research avenues for management scholars studying multilingual settings” (Angouri, Meyer, et al.,). Having read through “Can you Speak Covid-19? Languages and Social Inequality in Management Studies,” I put forth the idea that Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace is dated, even if it is only 7 years old. Angouri’s current texts profess looking to the future, but Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace seems stuck in the historical and theoretical past.