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The Project

Overview
Methodology
Data
Summary diagrams
Publications
Acknowledgements

Overview

In 1996, a team of researchers at Victoria University of Wellington began an innovative study of spoken communication in New Zealand workplaces.

The aims of the project are to:

• Identify the characteristics of effective communication between people
• Diagnose possible causes of miscommunication
• Explore possible applications of the findings for New Zealand workplaces

The project team began collecting recordings of workplace interactions in 1996 in four government organisations: the Ministry of Women's Affairs, the Ministry of Māori Development (Te Puni Kōkiri), the Ministry of Forestry, and the Education and Training Support Agency (Wellington Regional Office).

In 1997, the project was extended to include recordings from workplaces outside the government sector. Organisations which have collaborated in the research include Relationship Services, Telecom, Mobil Oil and Unilever Australasia.  In collaboration with UNITEC Institute of Technology, Auckland, we have also made recordings at an Auckland tanning factory (part of the Affco group of companies), and small businesses in Hawke's Bay (in collaboration with the Eastern Institute of Technology (EIT)). More recently, we have recorded interactions in hospital settings and also in IT organisations and publishing companies.

In 2006, we received funding to continue our research, focussing in particular on the language of leadership in
organisations. In this phase, we are examining the similarities and differences in Māori and Pākehā leadership styles, and aim to explore how effective Māori leadership strategies might be overlooked in a mainstream management analysis.

Methodology

Volunteers in each organisation taped everyday work-related meetings or discussions in government policy units, management groups, project teams, factory production teams and small businesses. They also recorded some telephone calls and social conversations, and the project team videotaped a number of larger, more formal meetings from most workplaces.

Data

So far the team has collected approximately 1,500 interactions involving a total of 450 people in 20 different workplaces, though some are as short as 20 seconds, and others are several hours long.

 Information on interactions
 Information on participants

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Summary diagrams

Three diagrams summarise aspects of the Language in the Workplace project:
 Participating workplaces
 Types of analysis
 Implications and applications

 View all in one document

Publications

Holmes, Janet (2000) Victoria University's Language in the Workplace Project: An Overview, Language in the Workplace Occasional Papers 1.
 HTML       PDF

Stubbe, Maria and Megan Ingle (1999) Collecting natural interaction data in a factory: Some methodological challenges.  Paper presented at Murdoch Symposium on Talk-in-Interaction, Perth, September 1999.
 HTML       PDF

Stubbe, Maria (2001) From office to production line: Collecting data for the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project. Language in the Workplace Occasional Papers 2.
 HTML      PDF

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all those organisations and people who have been involved in the Project so far.  Your contributions have been invaluable to the research we have been able to carry out to date and the success of the Project in the long run.

Our current research is funded by a Marsden grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand. In previous years we have received grants from the New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology and Victoria University of Wellington

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