Workplace Interaction
Chair: Meredith Marra
Repetition in Humour in Australian Blue-Collar Workplace Interactions
Lara Weinglass, UQ
Exploring Team Cohesion Through Humour. An Ethnographic Study of a Professional Football Team
Solvejg Wolfers, Warwick
“Ha, I Should Identify Myself as an Expert?”: Humour and Affiliation in Workplace Online Group Chat
Ying Cao, Western Sydney
Comments 18
Kia ora koutou
As someone who also works in the area of humour in workplace discourse, I’m very happy to have been given the opportunity to chair this panel. And as one of the members of the organising committee I am also delighted to be able to engage with papers that so closely match our theme. Thank you to Lara, Sol and Ying for your excellent papers.
Having the watched the three contributions I was struck by the productive overlaps between the different papers (not to mention the high quality of the research that they represent). Interactional pragmatics and Interactional Sociolinguistics feature strongly and explicitly which helps with this. I’d be really keen to hear from the presenters about how their ethnographic work (or attempt to gain an emic, participant understanding) impacted on their interpretations of the data. I also note that we have three different national contexts in which the data was collected. How relevant was this to the data interpretation?
On a personal level I was interested in the orientation to humour support strategies which feature throughout the panel, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. I could see evidence of Jen Hay’s taxonomy of responses to humour represented in these discussions. Her 1996 article and the 1995 MA thesis where the list originates is something we have also been revisiting in our own research recently to see if the strategies hold up 25 years later. Do any of the presenters have any thoughts about their validity or whether we should be adding other categories or collapsing categories based on their own analysis?
Looking forward to a fruitful discussion throughout the conference (both here online and with the in person delegates)!
Meredith
Hi Meredith! Thanks for chairing our panel getting the discussion started.
While my research is informed by Conversation Analysis (CA), I think it’s also important to take ethnographic data into consideration, and to look at the situated contexts of the interactions, which is why I would consider my work to be Interactional Pragmatics (and not pure CA). The participants in the data I presented in this talk have been working together for more than a year, and the nature of their work means they work closely – they are generally doing the same tasks concurrently, or working together on the same task and helping each other with it. The frequent use of humour and the affiliative responses to it provides evidence of their longstanding positive working relationship.
As you’d know from my previous AHSN talks, this is not the case in the two other workplaces I’ve analysed! In another workplace I recorded, there’s a lot of ‘unlaughter’ (thanks for bringing that term to my attention, Sol!), particularly in response to teases and self-deprecation where we’d expect laughter or at least some response, so the dispreferred response of silence says a lot about ingroup and outgroup membership (especially when the lack of response appears to be for only one participant – the boss!). So because of the very different humour found in the three workplaces, I’ve struggled with how to present the analysis of my data, as to take a collections-based (CA) approach doesn’t take the different workplace contexts into account. Who the participants are and their relationships with their co-workers are important factors to consider when analysing this data.
Thinking about taxonomies of humour – whilst helpful to analysis, I think they can also be problematic since humour performs many functions, often simultaneously.
One thing that has changed in the past 25 years is that now video-recorded data is the norm. Do you think a taxonomy of humour support might be expanded to include non-linguistic features, e.g. a smile, a nod, a marked facial expression (e.g., mock horror) or gesture.
Hi Lara (and Ying who has also replied to the question about humour support strategies)
I think our own online data would also support the idea of extending beyond the taxonomy. I do wonder whether some of the strategies/devices we are seeing perform the same function as the earlier list, just with a different instantiations which include the written and multimodal features that we once spent less time focused on. Interesting ongoing discussion I think!
Hello Meredith,
Thank you for chairing and also for your questions!
Using Interactional Sociolinguistics as my ethnographically-led approach to Discourse Analysis, the ethnographic knowledge of the context indeed shaped my project immensely. Thanks to the immersion in the field I was for example able to observe contextualisation cues that helped in the identification of humour attempts (such as a change in pitch, use of smile voice, reference to group knowledge, etc.).
The indexing of national, cultural or ethno-religious differences is part of the shared negotiated repertoire of the team under investigation. Very often players constructed ‘racialised’ identities in and through humour. A team norm emerging from the data was having to accept certain interactional roles and identities such as being the butt of the humour – even when constructed through ‘racialised’ humour. In addition, collecting data in German posed a challenge in that the translation of humour is inherently difficult. Therefore, some of the exact colloquial language may slightly differ from the original.
With regards to humour support strategies: I agree with the comments already made and believe that the taxonomy of humour responses can be revised. In my thesis I propose a failed humour continuum (mostly building on the work of Hay, Bell, and Priego-Valverde) accounting for different manifestations of failed humour in interaction. With the continuum I offer a more systematic counter-narrative to a mostly binary view on humour, i.e. failed vs. successful. Naturally, the continuum (ranging from unperceived to rejected) is an idealised description of the possible scenarios of failed humour. Nevertheless, it is my attempt in adding to the work already done on humour responses.
I am looking forward to discussing further!
Best from snowy Germany,
Sol
Hi Sol, thanks for your interesting presentation – what a great data set!
You touched on it in passing, but could you talk a bit more about ‘taking the piss’ in German? I know we Aussies think it’s an Australian thing, and Kiwis think it’s a Kiwi thing, so I’d be interested to know more about what it entails in German. This might also address Meredith’s question about the different national contexts.
Best wishes for your Viva!
Lara
Hi Lara,
Thanks a lot! One of my supervisors is a Kiwi so I may have borrowed the term from him.
But in German we also have what maybe can better be described as put-down humour (“veräppeln”). But I cannot elaborate on differences with regards to differences in national contexts I’m afraid.
Best wishes,
Sol
I agree with Meredith’s comments about these excellent presentations. Looking forward to discussing them online later today.
4-5pm AEDT (Melbourne/Sydney/Canberra). Zoom link https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83269611574 [Meeting ID: 832 6961 1574]
Thanks Kerry! Looking forward to seeing you then (3pm Brisbane time!).
For Ying Cao.
Thank you very much for your presentation, and especially for addressing online interactions, which I am currently interested in (and currently engaging in!).
You gave a lot of very informative numbers on the amount and types of humor you found in your data set, and I appreciate that very much. I’m interested in your thoughts about how that data might compare with face-to-face workplace interaction in China.
Maybe you’re not in a position to answer from direct knowledge, but would you say that those types and amounts of interactional workplace humor in the online, typed chat groups occurred at roughly the same frequency as they would if all the people involved were speaking in face-to-face meetings/interactions? I kind of wonder if people take more (or fewer) chances with humor when they are online as opposed to looking directly at their interlocutor(s). If you have any thoughts on that I would appreciate hearing them.
Thank you.
Dear Scott,
Thanks so much for your comments.
The data I collected is mainly from Feb, 2019 and June 2020, which is exactly the period that Chinese universities shut down the campus and transfer most of the classes and meetings to online forms for both students and teachers. During this time period, the online meeting seems significantly more than the off-line ones, and it drives me to see how it is different from our face-to-face weekly faculty meetings.
Although I have not conducted the compare and contrast research yet, I could say that the situations would be different from what you have expected based on my observations. Basically, the face-to-face meetings in Chinese universities nearly see no chance to observe humour in interaction, with only a few occasions that the speaker (normally enjoys a higher power status than other members) will use self-depreciation humour. However, the situations might be different in the workplace context, other than universities, in China. This is because I think university teachers in Chinese is still the group of people who are largely influenced by the traditional concept of humour (the point I mentioned in the last slide of my presentation) and are less likely to use and appreciate humour in a face-to-face in formal workplace conversations (small talk might be different).
I hope I answered your questions. Thanks again Scott for your time to listen to my presentation!
Ying
Hi Meredith,
Thanks for charing this panel and your inspiring comments on our presentations.
I also appreciate what Lara and Sol have been done in their research. It is very impressive and thought-provoking.
For Meredith’s comments, I do see the potentiality to expand the category of humour support strategy. I agree with Sol’s comments that the forms of humour support have been significantly enriched, especially in various online discourse, where the humour support strategy could be presented in a multi-modal way (such as memes, emojis and so on).
Hope to discuss with you more in the upcoming discussion session. Thanks for Kerry for charing the discussion session.
Ying
Hi Lara!
Thank you for your video-talk! Apart from really interesting data, I am particularly impressed with the quality of your video! It felt like I was sitting right next to you when you were presenting – so I might have to invest in some good recording equipment myself now… haha
I have a methodological question with regards to data collection. Were you at all present during the video-recordings of these interactions? And if so, how would you reflect on your influence on the conversational humour taking place?
Looking forward to speaking more!
Best,
Sol
Thanks Sol!
My recording was nothing fancy – I just used zoom and the camera in my laptop – so I’m glad it sounded good!
In answer to your methodological question – only minimally. For two of the three workplaces, I was really only present initially to show them how to use the equipment, and then I popped in a couple of times to swap over batteries and download files etc. I was onsite for a few days at the first workplace I recorded, which did help me understand how things worked in that workplace, but I think my presence made some participants a bit uneasy.
Lara
Hi Ying!
Also, thank you for your talk – I really enjoyed your presentation!
I have a question with regards to the emojis used for the identification of humour. Me and my partner have different mobile phone systems (Android and iOS) which makes our emojis look slightly different. Due to these subtle differences in the design of the emojis we use and interpret them differently. So I was wondering whether you have any means of triangulating the data by using e.g. interview data about how the teachers from your study interpret the specific emojis? This could potentially be really fruitful 🙂 (If you haven’t already done so.)
Looking forward to discussing further!
Best,
Sol
Thank you all for the really stimulating and focused discussion. We’ve had a long weekend in New Zealand after the conference, but I still spent much of the time thinking about the exciting concepts etc that arose in the papers. The continuum that Sol mentioned between failed and successful humour also came up in some of the in person talks, so I think there is some interesting movement to be had there.
Looking forward to having a chance to talk to you all in person (again) sometime in the future and many thanks for your excellent contributions to the panel.
Thanks Meredith! It was great to be able to have the chance to talk about our presentations in this way, although of course I’m also really looking forward to the next time we can all meet in person!
Thanks Meredith!
I am glad the continuum drew interest and wish I could’ve attended the live talks as well.
By now I have successfully passed my viva (YAY!) and will soon be able to send my thesis to those interested.
I hope to be able to see everyone in person again soon!
Best wishes,
Sol