Humour in business: A double-edged sword

A study of humour and style shifting in

intercultural business meetings

















The purpose of the study is to investigate the occurrence and role of humour in a series of
intercultural business meetings. It focused on how some speakers appeared to be more influential than
others,both in terms of the quality and quantity of their contributions,despite the conventionalized
restrictions on participants other than the chairperson to exert power in such formal meetings. As there
is limited interaction-based analysis of authentic business events to support the suggestion that how
humour is used and interpreted in business talk is complex despite the amount of anecdotal evidence to
suggest that this is an issue of international business contexts,this study aims to add to this body of
research by investigating humour in an intercultural business context.

This analysis draws particularly on a set of politeness maxim,(Leech,1983,Grice,1975,Lakoff,
1973) particularly the work of Lakoff (1973, 1979) and Tannen (1984) and the concept of interactive or
communicative style resulting from the habitual use of conventionalised linguistic or discourse
strategies (Gumperz, 1982)the concepts of conversational involvement (Tannen, 1984, Gumperz,
1982) and rapport (Spencer-Oatey and Jiang, 2003, Bateson, 1953) by which the construction of
meaning in discourse is achieved jointly by speakers and listeners who share familiar discourse or
interactive strategies. Interactive strategies reflect the linguistic choices made at different levels in
order to manage rapport in interaction, by balancing the needs of individuals for social proximity and
social distance.

The study was carried out in a series of internal management-level meetings in a large airline
corporation in south-east Asia. The data were collected from four meetings which were audio-recorded
over a period of one week. All the meetings are similar in structure and function,in that they are all
intra-department management meeting,each focusing on a particular company-specific issue. All
participants hold managerial positions and some have senior management or executive posts. The
participants were also said to represent established 'discourse communities'(Swales,1990), meaning
they were familiar with the meeting procedure and other participants. It is also noted that three of the
four meetings are 'intercultural' in that there is a combination of Anglophone expatriates (i.e.
Br i t i sh, I r i sh, Aust r al i an, Amer i can, Canadi an) and et hni c Chi nese ( i . e. Hong Kong
Chinese,Singaporean,Malaysian,Indian).The meetings vary in terms of the proportion of native speaker
to non native speakers of English,gender,and also rank.

This study is both a quantitative and qualitative study. The data analysis was carried out in two
stages. The first, quantitative stage looked at procedural aspects of the discourse,how talk was managed
through for instance turn allocation, interruptions, rebuttals and topic control. Secondly, qualitative
stage,used the information gathered in the quantitative analysis to investigated speakers use of
interactive strategies, such as reservation (i.e. avoiding disclosing intensity of feeling either through
prosodic, lexical or syntactic choices or through talking little)or contextualisation (i.e. referring to
shared knowledge or values, for instance through the use of metaphor, vague language or puns),
focusing on recurring patterns of discourse features by a single speaker or a group of speakers.

Linguistically,detailed qualitative and quantitative analyses revealed
considerable variation in interactive style, despite the overall similarity in structure and function
of the meetings. These stylistic variations related to differences in the level of formality between
meetings and stylistic shifts from formal to informal episodes within meetings.
It can be concluded that variations in interactive style reflect variations in the use of
interactive strategies: how individuals use such strategies seems to be dependent on what they
consider to be appropriate interactive behaviour. There was a set of commonly recurring interactive
strategies in the meetings, and clusters of these strategies were used repeatedly by some groups of
speakers,particularly by the most influential speakers. One feature in the clusters of commonly
recurring interactive strategies was the use of humour. The use of humour is frequently related to shifts
in style from formality to greater informality, and is often associated with clusters of interactive
strategies sometimes used by individuals but more usually by groups of speakers who became in-
groups.

As a conclusion, although humour is common to all four meetings, the style of humour varies
between meetings. Humour is characteristically collaboratively constructed and frequently realised
through linguistic devices or commonly consists of witty one liner or pun which interrupt or subvert the
ongoing talk. In all the meetings the humorous episodes are associated with shifts towards greater
informality. This stylistic shift can be seen as fluctuating between a serious formal context and
lighter,more informal segments. Humour is used strategically to include and exclude.These features
can be used to mark hierarchical relationships through dominance and submission,and also to show
horizontal relationship of influence through collusion or solidarity among those who share group
affiliation or identity. Humour is culture-bound,as in how the individuals use such strategies is
dependent what they consider appropriate interactive behaviour,which related to the particular cultural
or discourse community they belong to.

As mentioned,this study is necessarily limited in that it is based on a relatively small corpus
taken from one particular organization in one particular country.It is also selective in its treatment of
that corpus. Thus, it is more indicative rather than definitive. The researcher also suggested that the
findings need to be validated externally against other studies and other corpora from a range of
corporate and cultural context as it might results in different patterns of interactive behaviour,including
the use of humour. But,it is stated that the findings do seem to reflect some findings from previous
research,particularly regarding relationships between style shifting and humour (Bateson,1953),humour
and rapport management (Holmes et al.,2001,Grindsted,1997) and humour and cultral differences in
professional communication (Holmes,1998,Grindsted,1997,Lewis,1999,Tannen,1995).

In this study,it can be seen that humour can have many functions. Looking from its function in
the workplace,as was the study,points to many variables which includes,gender,ethnicity,and other
social factor such as age,education,rank etc.,which partially influence the naturally occurring discourse
in the study but, as it is focusing on how talk is managed in an inter cultural business environment,more
studies on can be done looking at humour,as it would be contributing to the field,as through this
study,new insights on humour can be gained.