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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 221

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

The Sociolinguistics of Organizational Styling

Authors: Wee, Lionel
Submitted by: Wee, Lionel (National University of Singapore, Singapore)

The sociolinguistics of style, originally conceptualized by Labov as intra-speaker variation arising from more or less careful/formal speech (Coupland 2007: 38), has in recent times been reconceptualized so as to give greater weight to speakers’ strategies for meaning making. In the course of this reconceptualization, not only has the understanding of style been broadened so that formality is just one of the many possible social meanings that speakers might be concerned with, greater attention has also been given to the processual and agentive dimensions of style, that is, to how speakers actively make use of the linguistic and non-linguistic resources available to them in order to project social identities and influence or construct social relationships. The reconceptualization therefore makes it more appropriate to speak in general of ‘styling’ rather than ‘style’ (Coupland 2007: 2).

Nevertheless, this shift towards styling as agentive, deliberate and strategic remains true to the earlier Labovian conception in one important respect: It is very much focused on speakers, or more generally, persons. Less attention has been given to the styling activities of other entities such as organizations. This omission is puzzling given that, unlike the original conception of style, there is no definitional constraint that insists on limiting styling to speakers. Styling has been reconceptualized as involving ‘creative, design-oriented processes’ that serve as ‘resources for meaning-making’ (Coupland 2007: 3), which means that there is no reason why we should not speak of and attend to the styling of organizations.

Organizations are ‘social units where individuals are conscious of their membership and legitimize their co-operative activities by reference to the attainment of impersonal goals rather than to moral standards’ (Albrow 1997: 29). Unlike persons (who are born), organizations are created. They are entities that have been established in order to serve particular goals (Parsons 1960: 17). These goals (selling insurance, providing matchmaking services, raising funds for charity, etc.) impose significant constraints on organizational styling. In fact, one of the key steps involved in creating an organization is the specification of just what kind of organization it is supposed to be and hence what kind of purpose it is supposed to fulfill. An organization’s styling will thus have to be consistent with its ‘primary’ purpose.

The ontological status of organizations therefore leads to different styling constraints than those that might be visited upon persons, and in this paper, I discuss various properties (agency versus accountability, authenticity versus sincerity, high versus mundane performance) that distinguish organizational styling from the styling of persons, taking as my point of departure the properties of styling identified by Coupland (2007).

References:

Albrow, Martin. 1997. Do organizations have feelings? London: Routledge.

Blau, P. M. and Scott, W. R. 1963. Formal organizations. London: Routledge.

Coupland, N. (2007) Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Parsons, Talcott. 1960. Structure and process in modern societies. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press.