Leadership, Discourse, and Ethnicity

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 Ethnicityproblematizes 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.

Janet Holmes is Professor of Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington.

Meredith Marra is Senior Lecturer, School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington.

Bernadette Vine is Corpus Manager, School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington.