‘You need help as usual, do you?’: Joking and swearing for collegiality in a Swedish workplace

Abstract

This paper draws on the KINSA project (The Communicative Situation of Immigrants at Swedish Workplaces), which aimed to identify communicative factors that have a positive impact on the integration of second language speakers in the workplace and in their immediate work team. The focus here is on humour and swearing as strategies for doing collegiality and for building and maintaining good relations between co-workers. The article presents data from five second language speakers, permanently employed industrial or office workers in a major Swedish company. Theoretically and methodologically, the paper has its basis in discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication. By means of fieldwork, a large body of empirical data was collected, comprising detailed field notes, audio and video recordings of naturally occurring talk, and texts processed and produced by participants. The analysis of the data shows that metalinguistic and metacultural awareness and performance of relational communicative acts among the participants appear to have helped to facilitate and consolidate integration in the workplace and the immediate work team. To foster good relations at work, the five participants make strategic use of jokes, compliments, narratives, swearing and greetings. In this article the use of jokes and swearing is highlighted. It closes by making a case for future research in the area of integration in the workplace through relational communication, especially among second language speakers.

Social Integration of Immigrants within the Linguistically Diverse Workplace: A Systematic Review

“…These claims were also supported by Schaeffer and Bukenya (2010), who found that language was a determining factor when it comes to social integration of immigrants at the workplace. Nelson's (2014) research was also somewhat consistent with the aforementioned studies because her study suggested that the second language should be used strategically to "foster good relations at work" and to "facilitate and consolidate integration in the workplace" (p. 173). This implies that Nelson (2014) also linked local language competence to workplace integration of immigrants.…”

“…Page 18 The data have shown that language competence can be linked to social exclusion. For the blue-collar workers with no English skills as well as other Danes with limited English skills, their lack of language competence means that they are excluded from obtaining basic information at work, and they believe that their lack of language competence prevents them from looking for a better job Nelson (2014) Most studies were qualitative (n=8); two studies used quantitative methods. Of the qualitative studies, there was a case study, a grounded theory study, ethnographic studies (n=3), and thematic analysis studies (n=3).…”

“…The three remaining studies, two were thematic analysis and one was an ethnographic study, investigated the implications of communicative practices for social interaction and intergroup perceptions. Sample sizes of the qualitative studies ranged from five (Nelson, 2014) to 82 (Tange & Lauring, 2009). The two quantitative studies had 204 (Colic-Peisker & Hlavac, 2014) and 2023 participants (Schaeffer & Bukenya, 2010).…”

“…Immigrant employees also reported lack of knowledge-sharing due to their lack of or weak Danish skills, and believed that they could not advance within the hierarchy of the organization (Lønsmann, 2014). Nelson's (2014) empirical study on the relationship between social integration and local language skills found that participants, who were second language speakers of Swedish, used their Swedish linguistic skills strategically to negotiate their integration in the workplace and in their immediate work group. The author found that certain communicative factors have a positive impact on the integration of local language speakers in the workplace and in their immediate work team.…”

Digital Business Discourse

“…Despite a handful of scholarly works (e.g., ) that have articulated the linguistic features of workplace instant messaging, there has been generally little research on swearing in workplace instant messaging, especially in Asian contexts. Studies on swearing by second language speakers of English have been equally scant (Nelson, 2014). Drawing on sets of English instant messages 1 produced by Hong Kong Chinese workers in two Hong Kong trading firms, this chapter investigates the impact of swearing in instant messaging in the backoffice as well as the involved acting out of identity and power.…”