The Language of Corporate Social Responsibility: Language Discrimination

Apr 28, 2023

Raves, poker nights and Marvel movies – no costs or effort were spared in this final episode on CSR to raise awareness about one of the most pervasive manifestations of discrimination: accentism. In the presence of experts, we uncover what is hidden beneath the surface, and just when we thought we would never judge someone based on the sound waves they produce, we dare(d) ourselves and you to eat the pudding…

 

Long Notes:

More information, a full transcript and academic references on wordsandactions.blog.

We start episode 28 by critically reflecting on anti-discrimination efforts in the workplace, which, unless they change the organisational culture, all too often do not have the desired or even an adverse effect. We then move on to the notion of intersectionality, which linguist and writer Kat Gupta has likened to a deck of cards.

The fascinating finding that feelings of non-belonging are neurologically similar to physical pain is reported here:

Eisenberger, N. I. (2012). The pain of social disconnection: examining the shared neural underpinnings of physical and social pain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 13(6), 421-434.

Moving on to the language aspect of workplace discrimination, Bernard entions Erin Carrie’s  and Rob Drummond’s Accentism Project, which, among other things, is a real treasure trove of testimonials.  

For a light touch, we look at how film characters are stereotyped through their accents - who could forget Babs and Rocky from Chicken Run?

In another corner of the cinematic universe, the villain with a British Received Pronunciation accent is so common that he has sparked parodies in advertising. In real life, however, this particular accent is nearly extinct:

Lindsey, G. (2019). English after RP: Standard British pronunciation today. Springer.

Linguistic stereotyping and accentism can have harsh consequences, for how competent someone is perceived to be to how much investor money they can attract or the severity of court sentence

Our second guest, Annelise Ly, mentions the metaphor of culture as an onion with layers. This idea goes back to Geert Hofstede’s work on national cultures in the workplace:

Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture’s Consequences: International differences in work-related values. London: Sage.

While still influential, Hofstede’s work has been the subject of much criticism, and other metaphors have been proposed:

Fang, T. (2005). From “onion” to “ocean”: Paradox and change in national cultures. International Studies of Management & Organization, 35(4), 71-90.

In the final part of the episode, we use Mats Deutschmann’s RAVE resource to test our own stereotypes around accents. Mats and his colleague Anders Steinvall have written about how to use the resource to counter prejudice: 

Deutschmann, M., & Steinvall, A. (2020). Combatting linguistic stereotyping and prejudice by evoking stereotypes. Open Linguistics, 6(1), 651-671.

We encourage you to give it a go yourself, it’s quite an eye-opener.