Trivial, mundane or revealing? Food as a lens on ethnic norms in workplace talk

Abstract

Talk about food has often been overlooked in existing investigations of workplace discourse. In earlier research, we established that food talk clearly 'indexes' interactional boundaries and informality in typical New Zealand workplaces. In this paper we identify the very different status of food as a legitimate topic in Māori workplaces. Within the normative constraints of the meeting genre, analysis compares food talk as. mundanein a Māori organisation, but. trivialin a Pākehā (majority group) context. Food talk thus provides an unexpected means of accessing information about distinctive cultural norms, offering an innovative lens on areas of cross-cultural sensitivity. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.