Leadership, Discourse, and Ethnicity

Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics

by Janet Holmes, Meredith Marra, Bernadette Vine

This is the first book in the field of workplace discourse to examine the relationships among leadership, ethnicity, and language use. Taking a social constructionist approach to the ways in which leadership is enacted through discourse, Leadership, Discourse, and Ethnicity problematizes the concept of ethnicity and demonstrates the importance of context-particularly the community of practice-in determining what counts as relevant in the analysis of ethnicity. The authors analyse everyday workplace interactions supplemented by interview data to examine the ways in which workplace leaders use language to achieve their transactional and relational goals in contrasting "ethnicized" contexts, two of which are Maori and two European/Pakeha. Their analysis pays special attention to the roles of ethnic values, beliefs and orientations in talk.

206 pages, Paperback

First published November 7, 2011

About the author

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Janet Holmes (b. 1947) is a professor of linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand). She specializes in sociolinguistics, language and gender issues, workplace communication, and in New Zealand English.