Meredith Marra
Biographic Data
| ID | 92586 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Meredith Marra |
| GIVEN NAMES | Meredith |
| FAMILY NAME | Marra |
| SIGNATURE | MARRA M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Victoria University of Wellington |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1862-6488 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 340 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Pragmatics and Culture
What is meant by the term culture within the field of pragmatics continues to evolve in both dramatic and subtle ways. In this entry, I track the place of culture in pragmatic research over time, noting the changing analytic focus, the methods for data collection, and the theoretical developments that motivate our interests. I move from the early cross‐cultural focus operationalized via speech act theory, through the pragmatic differences identif…
Discourse Analysis and Conversation Analysis
Discourse analysis (DA) is an umbrella term which refers to a range of qualitative frameworks used for the empirical examination of language in use.
“Climbing the Same Mountain”: Meeting Openings as Bicultural Practice in Two Workplaces in Aotearoa New Zealand
The enactment of biculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand has varied greatly over the time since colonial settlement, and it is still a debated and evolving concept. In this article we examine practices adopted by one Māori Chief Executive Officer in two different workplaces at two different points in time to illustrate this process in action. Our analysis examines the way he opens meetings of his senior management teams, demonstrating the way he ad…
Leadership and managing conflict in meetings
There is extensive literature describing the characteristics of a good leader in the area of organisational communication and business management. However, the research tends to be based on secondary, survey or reported data, typically interviews and questionnaires. Moreover, the predominant image of a “good” leader tends to be a charismatic, inspirational, decisive, authoritative, ‘hero’. The Language in the Workplace database provides a large c…
Laughing along: Negotiating belonging as a workplace newcomer
Successfully joining a new workplace community is demanding, especially when this involves crossing national boundaries in addition to team boundaries. For outsiders, humour is an area that arguably presents a challenge to full participation, particularly when local understandings are not shared, nor even recognized as distinctive. Newcomers face the challenge of navigating the trajectory from legitimate peripheral member towards core status (ado…
Contesting the Culture Order: Contrastive Pragmatics in Action
Contrastive pragmatics encourages a focus on variation in the ways that different groups enact their distinctive cultural values and norms. In New Zealand, Pākehā (European-based) ways of doing things are the norm, taken-for-granted and rarely questioned or even noted unless someone “breaks the rules”. For minority group members, however, including the indigenous Māori people, Pākehā norms are ever-present reminders of their non-dominant position…
Addressing societal discourses: Negotiating an employable identity as a former refugee
This paper explores a critical area of refugee resettlement, namely securing stable, desirable employment in host nations. When telling their ‘narratives of flight’, our analytic focus, refugees demonstrate discursive agency and identities that conflict with a societal stereotype of vulnerability and helplessness that employers might expect. Insights suggest opportunities for new ways of supporting former refugees to find appropriate employment i…
Explicit or implicit? Facilitating interactional competence through mentoring discourse at work
Dans toutes les organisations, il est important d'assurer l'accompagnement des nouveaux venus et des jeunes collaborateurs afin de favoriser le développement professionnel et la compétence interactionnelle. Cet accompagnement peut prendre de nombreuses formes, qu'il s'agisse de commentaires très explicites dans un contexte formel ou d'un mentorat subtil et implicite par le biais de conversations plus anodines. À partir d'interactions spontanées, …
Ethnographic methods in pragmatics
Negotiating the tall poppy syndrome in New Zealand workplaces
The ‘tall poppy syndrome’ (TPS) is one example of a societal constraint whose function in Australasia is to enforce society-wide ideologies such as egalitarianism and the gender order. The TPS acts as an enforcement mechanism which keeps self-promoting discourse in check. While carefully managed selfpromotion is permissible in some contexts, there are others where New Zealanders are expected to behave with modesty and humility. Using a social rea…
Doing power and negotiating through disagreement in public meetings
Power in meetings may be enacted in many ways, ranging from democratic and collaborative through to authoritative and didactic, with the exact positioning on this continuum typically under the control of the chair. By contrast with the focus of most previous research on the behaviour of institutionally ratified chairs of intact teams, this paper examines how volunteer chairs of small focus groups in public meetings use the power associated with t…
Trivial, mundane or revealing? Food as a lens on ethnic norms in workplace talk
Doing listenership: One aspect of sociopragmatic competence at work
The skills involved in contributing competently in workplace interaction include enacting attentive listenership and providing appropriate feedback to the talk of others. These sociopragmatic skills are often overlooked, and when non-native-like listener feedback does attract attention, cultural differences are commonly cited to account for differences observed. In this paper, we analyse data from recordings made by Chinese skilled migrants in Ne…
Politeness and impoliteness in ethnic varieties of New Zealand English
Disagreeing without being disagreeable: Negotiating workplace communities as an outsider
Leadership discourse in a Maori workplace
Masculinist gender norms and majority group ethnic norms are always covertly relevant as important systemic characteristics of interaction at work, subtly influencing people’s unconscious interpretations of what is considered appropriate in the workplace and influencing evaluations of the ways in which individuals do gender, ethnicity and leadership. Drawing on material from the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project, we focus on a particul…
Harnessing Storytelling as a Sociopragmatic Skill: Applying Narrative Research to Workplace English Courses
Narratives are often overlooked in workplace talk, but they contribute in crucial ways to relationship building and identity construction in workplace interaction. In this article we analyse narratives told by skilled migrants from non‐English‐speaking backgrounds during a workplace internship conducted as part of a Workplace Communication course. The analysis adopts a social constructionist stance recognising that narratives are co‐constructed b…
Corporate meetings as genre: A study of the role of the chair in corporate meeting talk
Meetings are the backbone of organizational life and as such constitute an important component of workplace discourse. We expand here upon earlier work which suggests that a meeting constitutes a distinct genre, taking informal rather than formal meeting talk as our focus. To further explore the genre theory perspective, the analysis draws on theoretical and analytical tools deriving from work on "activity types" (Levinson, Activity types and lan…
Māori men at work: Leadership, discourse, and ethnic identity
This paper explores a specific dimension of intercultural interaction by examining how leadership is enacted specifically through talk by two Māori male managers in New Zealand professional organizations. Any effective leader must be able to provide strong direction to his or her team, as well as having well-developed relational skills, and examples are provided to show how each leader achieves these facets of leadership in a very specific interc…
Chapter 9. Impoliteness as a means of contesting power relations in the workplace
Constructing ethnicity in New Zealand workplace stories
One important function of narratives in workplace interaction is the valuable contribution they make to the construction of complex social identities. These identities typically include a professional or workplace identity, but may also include other facets of self. In the New Zealand workplace, a mainstream ‘white’ identity can be considered the unmarked, communicative cultural norm. In this context, storytelling provides a creative and socially…
Exploring Co-leadership Talk Through Interactional Sociolinguistics
This article seeks to bring to the fore the processes by which leaders co-create leadership through collective talk within the workplace. Co-leadership has recently been recognized as an important aspect of leadership practice, especially at the top of organizations, yet it remains under-theorized and empirically under-explored. Guided by the desire to integrate concepts that have emerged from leadership psychology with discursive leadership appr…
Impoliteness and ethnicity: Māori and Pākehā discourse in New Zealand workplaces
In New Zealand, as in many other post-colonial societies, biculturalism is a one-way street: Māori New Zealanders are more likely to be bicultural than are Pākehā New Zealanders. Consequently it is Māori norms, including discourse norms, which are more likely to be ignored in most New Zealand workplaces, with the potential for misunderstanding, and even for offence and unintended insult. Our research in Māori and Pākehā workplaces suggests that u…
Ethnic differences in the dynamics of women's work meetings
While meeting management strategies have been investigated by a number of researchers, the ways in which participants' ethnicity and associated cultural norms may influence the discourse patterns of meetings is still relatively under-examined. Using data from New Zealand meetings, this paper investigates how Pākehā majority group norms typically legitimise assumptions which may prove quite inaccurate in interpreting what is going on in meetings w…
Being (im)polite in New Zealand workplaces: Māori and Pākehā leaders
Having a laugh at work
Over the edge? Subversive humor between colleagues and friends
Relational practice in the workplace: Women's talk or gendered discourse
This article explores the concept of relational practice, the wide range of off-line, backstage, or collaborative work that people do which goes largely unrecognized and unrewarded in the workplace (Fletcher 1999). The analysis identifies a range of different ways in which people do relational practice in workplace discourse, and critically examines the proposal that, as subtle support work, relational practice is considered “women's work.” Drawi…
Exploring Co-leadership Talk Through Interactional Sociolinguistics
This article seeks to bring to the fore the processes by which leaders co-create leadership through collective talk within the workplace. Co-leadership has recently been recognized as an important aspect of leadership practice, especially at the top of organizations, yet it remains under-theorized and empirically under-explored. Guided by the desire to integrate concepts that have emerged from leadership psychology with discursive leadership appr…
Being (im)polite in New Zealand workplaces: Māori and Pākehā leaders
Politeness and impoliteness in ethnic varieties of New Zealand English
Disagreeing without being disagreeable: Negotiating workplace communities as an outsider
Humor and leadership style
Drawing on authentic workplace interactions, this paper examines the ways in which effective leaders use humor as a discursive resource to construct particular aspects of leadership style. The conventional wisdom in leadership studies suggests that humor is an important tool for “good” leaders who inspire and challenge their subordinates. The management studies literature suggests a basic distinction between a traditional transactional style, whi…
Negotiating the tall poppy syndrome in New Zealand workplaces
The ‘tall poppy syndrome’ (TPS) is one example of a societal constraint whose function in Australasia is to enforce society-wide ideologies such as egalitarianism and the gender order. The TPS acts as an enforcement mechanism which keeps self-promoting discourse in check. While carefully managed selfpromotion is permissible in some contexts, there are others where New Zealanders are expected to behave with modesty and humility. Using a social rea…
Multiple Discourse Analyses of a Workplace Interaction
This article explores the contributions that five different approaches to discourse analysis can make to interpreting and understanding the same piece of data. Conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, politeness theory, critical discourse analysis, and discursive psychology are the approaches chosen for comparison. The data is a nine-minute audio recording of a spontaneous workplace interaction. The analyses are compared, and the th…
Leadership discourse in a Maori workplace
Masculinist gender norms and majority group ethnic norms are always covertly relevant as important systemic characteristics of interaction at work, subtly influencing people’s unconscious interpretations of what is considered appropriate in the workplace and influencing evaluations of the ways in which individuals do gender, ethnicity and leadership. Drawing on material from the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project, we focus on a particul…
Impoliteness and ethnicity: Māori and Pākehā discourse in New Zealand workplaces
In New Zealand, as in many other post-colonial societies, biculturalism is a one-way street: Māori New Zealanders are more likely to be bicultural than are Pākehā New Zealanders. Consequently it is Māori norms, including discourse norms, which are more likely to be ignored in most New Zealand workplaces, with the potential for misunderstanding, and even for offence and unintended insult. Our research in Māori and Pākehā workplaces suggests that u…
Ethnic differences in the dynamics of women's work meetings
While meeting management strategies have been investigated by a number of researchers, the ways in which participants' ethnicity and associated cultural norms may influence the discourse patterns of meetings is still relatively under-examined. Using data from New Zealand meetings, this paper investigates how Pākehā majority group norms typically legitimise assumptions which may prove quite inaccurate in interpreting what is going on in meetings w…
Trivial, mundane or revealing? Food as a lens on ethnic norms in workplace talk
Harnessing Storytelling as a Sociopragmatic Skill: Applying Narrative Research to Workplace English Courses
Narratives are often overlooked in workplace talk, but they contribute in crucial ways to relationship building and identity construction in workplace interaction. In this article we analyse narratives told by skilled migrants from non‐English‐speaking backgrounds during a workplace internship conducted as part of a Workplace Communication course. The analysis adopts a social constructionist stance recognising that narratives are co‐constructed b…
Māori men at work: Leadership, discourse, and ethnic identity
This paper explores a specific dimension of intercultural interaction by examining how leadership is enacted specifically through talk by two Māori male managers in New Zealand professional organizations. Any effective leader must be able to provide strong direction to his or her team, as well as having well-developed relational skills, and examples are provided to show how each leader achieves these facets of leadership in a very specific interc…
Over the edge? Subversive humor between colleagues and friends
Having a laugh at work
Women managing discourse in the workplace
Despite the fact that women are increasingly reaching the highest levels of management in business organisations, negative stereotypes persist concerning their ability to handle the discourse of leadership. Drawing on a large database of recorded material collected from women in a variety of New Zealand workplaces by the Victoria University of Wellington Language in the Workplace Project, this paper illustrates the value of both qualitative and q…
Multiple Discourse Analyses of a Workplace Interaction
This article explores the contributions that five different approaches to discourse analysis can make to interpreting and understanding the same piece of data. Conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, politeness theory, critical discourse analysis, and discursive psychology are the approaches chosen for comparison. The data is a nine-minute audio recording of a spontaneous workplace interaction. The analyses are compared, and the th…
Relational practice in the workplace: Women's talk or gendered discourse
This article explores the concept of relational practice, the wide range of off-line, backstage, or collaborative work that people do which goes largely unrecognized and unrewarded in the workplace (Fletcher 1999). The analysis identifies a range of different ways in which people do relational practice in workplace discourse, and critically examines the proposal that, as subtle support work, relational practice is considered “women's work.” Drawi…
Humor and leadership style
Drawing on authentic workplace interactions, this paper examines the ways in which effective leaders use humor as a discursive resource to construct particular aspects of leadership style. The conventional wisdom in leadership studies suggests that humor is an important tool for “good” leaders who inspire and challenge their subordinates. The management studies literature suggests a basic distinction between a traditional transactional style, whi…
Ethnic differences in the dynamics of women's work meetings
While meeting management strategies have been investigated by a number of researchers, the ways in which participants' ethnicity and associated cultural norms may influence the discourse patterns of meetings is still relatively under-examined. Using data from New Zealand meetings, this paper investigates how Pākehā majority group norms typically legitimise assumptions which may prove quite inaccurate in interpreting what is going on in meetings w…
Being (im)polite in New Zealand workplaces: Māori and Pākehā leaders
Chapter 9. Impoliteness as a means of contesting power relations in the workplace
Constructing ethnicity in New Zealand workplace stories
One important function of narratives in workplace interaction is the valuable contribution they make to the construction of complex social identities. These identities typically include a professional or workplace identity, but may also include other facets of self. In the New Zealand workplace, a mainstream ‘white’ identity can be considered the unmarked, communicative cultural norm. In this context, storytelling provides a creative and socially…
Exploring Co-leadership Talk Through Interactional Sociolinguistics
This article seeks to bring to the fore the processes by which leaders co-create leadership through collective talk within the workplace. Co-leadership has recently been recognized as an important aspect of leadership practice, especially at the top of organizations, yet it remains under-theorized and empirically under-explored. Guided by the desire to integrate concepts that have emerged from leadership psychology with discursive leadership appr…
Impoliteness and ethnicity: Māori and Pākehā discourse in New Zealand workplaces
In New Zealand, as in many other post-colonial societies, biculturalism is a one-way street: Māori New Zealanders are more likely to be bicultural than are Pākehā New Zealanders. Consequently it is Māori norms, including discourse norms, which are more likely to be ignored in most New Zealand workplaces, with the potential for misunderstanding, and even for offence and unintended insult. Our research in Māori and Pākehā workplaces suggests that u…
Māori men at work: Leadership, discourse, and ethnic identity
This paper explores a specific dimension of intercultural interaction by examining how leadership is enacted specifically through talk by two Māori male managers in New Zealand professional organizations. Any effective leader must be able to provide strong direction to his or her team, as well as having well-developed relational skills, and examples are provided to show how each leader achieves these facets of leadership in a very specific interc…
Corporate meetings as genre: A study of the role of the chair in corporate meeting talk
Meetings are the backbone of organizational life and as such constitute an important component of workplace discourse. We expand here upon earlier work which suggests that a meeting constitutes a distinct genre, taking informal rather than formal meeting talk as our focus. To further explore the genre theory perspective, the analysis draws on theoretical and analytical tools deriving from work on "activity types" (Levinson, Activity types and lan…
Leadership discourse in a Maori workplace
Masculinist gender norms and majority group ethnic norms are always covertly relevant as important systemic characteristics of interaction at work, subtly influencing people’s unconscious interpretations of what is considered appropriate in the workplace and influencing evaluations of the ways in which individuals do gender, ethnicity and leadership. Drawing on material from the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project, we focus on a particul…
Harnessing Storytelling as a Sociopragmatic Skill: Applying Narrative Research to Workplace English Courses
Narratives are often overlooked in workplace talk, but they contribute in crucial ways to relationship building and identity construction in workplace interaction. In this article we analyse narratives told by skilled migrants from non‐English‐speaking backgrounds during a workplace internship conducted as part of a Workplace Communication course. The analysis adopts a social constructionist stance recognising that narratives are co‐constructed b…
Politeness and impoliteness in ethnic varieties of New Zealand English
Disagreeing without being disagreeable: Negotiating workplace communities as an outsider
Doing listenership: One aspect of sociopragmatic competence at work
The skills involved in contributing competently in workplace interaction include enacting attentive listenership and providing appropriate feedback to the talk of others. These sociopragmatic skills are often overlooked, and when non-native-like listener feedback does attract attention, cultural differences are commonly cited to account for differences observed. In this paper, we analyse data from recordings made by Chinese skilled migrants in Ne…
Trivial, mundane or revealing? Food as a lens on ethnic norms in workplace talk
Doing power and negotiating through disagreement in public meetings
Power in meetings may be enacted in many ways, ranging from democratic and collaborative through to authoritative and didactic, with the exact positioning on this continuum typically under the control of the chair. By contrast with the focus of most previous research on the behaviour of institutionally ratified chairs of intact teams, this paper examines how volunteer chairs of small focus groups in public meetings use the power associated with t…
Negotiating the tall poppy syndrome in New Zealand workplaces
The ‘tall poppy syndrome’ (TPS) is one example of a societal constraint whose function in Australasia is to enforce society-wide ideologies such as egalitarianism and the gender order. The TPS acts as an enforcement mechanism which keeps self-promoting discourse in check. While carefully managed selfpromotion is permissible in some contexts, there are others where New Zealanders are expected to behave with modesty and humility. Using a social rea…
Ethnographic methods in pragmatics
Explicit or implicit? Facilitating interactional competence through mentoring discourse at work
Dans toutes les organisations, il est important d'assurer l'accompagnement des nouveaux venus et des jeunes collaborateurs afin de favoriser le développement professionnel et la compétence interactionnelle. Cet accompagnement peut prendre de nombreuses formes, qu'il s'agisse de commentaires très explicites dans un contexte formel ou d'un mentorat subtil et implicite par le biais de conversations plus anodines. À partir d'interactions spontanées, …
Contesting the Culture Order: Contrastive Pragmatics in Action
Contrastive pragmatics encourages a focus on variation in the ways that different groups enact their distinctive cultural values and norms. In New Zealand, Pākehā (European-based) ways of doing things are the norm, taken-for-granted and rarely questioned or even noted unless someone “breaks the rules”. For minority group members, however, including the indigenous Māori people, Pākehā norms are ever-present reminders of their non-dominant position…
Sociology (28 works) · Psychology (26 works) · Political science (21 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (20 works) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies (16 works) · Social Psychology (15 works) · Public relations (13 works) · Linguistics (12 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Social science (10 works)