The Way We Talk Around Here: How your organization’s culture shows up in your language and why it matters

by Gill Ereaut

You can’t transform what you can’t get hold of, and organisational culture is slippery and hard to pin down. But it’s powerful. So how can you catch hold of your culture to understand and work on it, without destroying its essence or value? The unspoken rules and unquestioned assumptions that make up corporate culture are so well hidden that, once we become insiders, we stop noticing them. But our shared language, ‘the way we talk around here’, contains the patterns of thought and behaviour that make up culture - ‘the way we do things around here’ - and offers a powerful and pragmatic approach to culture analysis. Gill Ereaut describes how to get to grips with organisational and team cultures through paying close attention to their language. If you’re responsible for managing an organisation’s or a team’s culture – or trying to thrive within one – find out how listening to language can help you map, understand and even transform that culture. Gill Ereaut founded UK consultancy Linguistic Landscapes Ltd. in 2002, pioneering the commercial application of language analysis to organisational challenges.

186 pages, Paperback

Published January 26, 2024

Reviews

[Dora Okeyo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love that this book speaks of "how we do things here" when talking about culture in organizations because I have often found that most organizations have a lot of things that are unspoken that affect work and yet it's not highlighted.
The author goes on to unpack language and its contribution to an organization's culture.
Thank you Netgalley for the eARC

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book did a great job of demonstrating how to use a discourse analysis in practice. People often ask me why I care about language, and the book perfectly shows that it is just as much about what the language reveals. It’s not just what you say but what you do.

[Caspar Mason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really insightful book on language, organisational culture and all the stuff that’s hiding in plain sight.