ABSTRACT
This chapter applies the first- and second-order culture distinction to the topic of face and politeness – a topic which seems to be of general interest and concern in Asia, not only to the professionals who participated in the research but also to other lay people. It analyses and discusses several examples of authentic workplace interactions from our corpus to illustrate some of the complex ways in which people actually do politeness and negotiate their own and each other's face needs while constructing, enacting and orienting to second-order notions of culture. Research on politeness in the workplace has demonstrated that there is considerable diversity in the politeness norms that characterise different workplaces as well as different teams within the same workplace. The chapter discusses one example to show how participants' claims about culture1 may sometimes be in line with the interactional behaviour they display.
