Workplace Culture

3.1: Understanding workplace cultures
3.2: The languages and cultures of expertise
4.2: Power dynamics in the workplace
6.4: Gender and workplace culture
6.7: Power dynamics in the workplace
7.3: The languages and cultures of expertise
9.4: Ethnographic observations of workplace cultures
10.2: What is truth? Can there be more than one truth?
10.3: Where does bias come from?
10.4: What are some consequences of relativism?
23.2: What level of technicality is culturally appropriate?
25.3: Consider the cultural contexts of your analysis

Communicating in the Culturally Diverse Workplace
A JobWeb article that succinctly highlights specific areas that cause cross-cultural difficulties in the workplace.

"Knowledge Networks" or Discourse Communities?
Brief article by a legal scholar that lays out the basic concepts of “knowledge networks” in terms of discourse communities.

Killingsworth's and Gilbertson's Pragmatic Taxonomy of Discourse Communities
Not as wonky as it sounds, Scott Kassner has created an easy-to-read table of characteristics of different discourse communities. It is adapted from M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Michael K. Gilbertson, Signs, Genres and Communities in Technical Communication (Amityville, New York: Baywood Publishing Company, Inc., 1992), 172-173.

The Progressive Information Network
Not everyone accepts workplace cultures as they are currently configured. This alliance of Teachers for a Democratic Culture, as well as Scholars, Artists and Writers for Social Justice and campus organizers are working to bring community debate and a more democratic atmosphere into the workplace. Their approach to workplace cultures is strongly rooted in critique.

The Sun Sets on the Bohemian Workplace
Dot com went dot bomb and along with it went foosball tables and bringing your dog to work. Fast Company, the magazine this article originally appeared in, almost went under itself. Read about how young business people tried to reinvent a new workplace ethos. What good ideas went down the tube with them?

Micron.com: The Micron Culture
A high tech firm describes its carefully cultivated workplace culture as a recruitment tool for top job applicants.

Writing Workplace Cultures: The Greater DC Dig
A graphical image map opens this intriguing approach to student study of workplace cultures from 1993-1999. Only the researcher’s abstracts are available, but taken as a whole, it is a terrific way to grasp what the study of workplace cultures entails.

[Return to the Top of this Page]