Constructing ethnicity in New Zealand workplace stories

Abstract

One important function of narratives in workplace interaction is the valuable contribution they make to the construction of complex social identities. These identities typically include a professional or workplace identity, but may also include other facets of self. In the New Zealand workplace, a mainstream ‘white’ identity can be considered the unmarked, communicative cultural norm. In this context, storytelling provides a creative and socially acceptable strategy for constructing a contrasting ethnic identity. This paper explores the ways in which ethnicity is constructed in a New Zealand Māori organization that comprises an ethnically distinct community of practice. An extended narrative sequence (extracted from a naturally occurring meeting) is analyzed in detail for this purpose. Despite the predominance of English as the language of work in this organization, there is abundant evidence of the pervasive relevance of Māori cultural principles. For these workers, ethnicity acts as a backdrop for all their workplace communication; well-established culturally based norms underpin the ways in which they interact, and the ways in which they construct their social (including ethnic) identity. In this context, the stories told at work contribute not only to the construction of the ethnic identity of individual speakers, but also provide a means for co-constructing a distinctive Māori identity for the group.