ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the complex ways in which the ‘culture order’ affects workplace interaction, including effective professional identity construction in work contexts, and illustrates how discourse analysis can usefully inform the development of teaching and learning resources for newcomers to the workforce. It identifies aspects of the sociopragmatic knowledge required for appropriate participation in workplace meetings which have implications for the negotiation of an appropriate professional identity in work contexts. Meeting researchers have established that there is a great deal of diversity in pre-meeting behaviour in different cultures. Influenced by the dominant culture order, ways of doing things at work vary in different cultures, different speech communities, different organisations and different communities of practice or workplace teams. At the organisational level there are further discourse norms which relate to the degree of formality of meetings at different levels of any organisational hierarchy, while at the community of practice level, the interactional norms of particular workplace teams are relevant.
