Paper notes are a widespread phenomenon in the workplace, even in times of home office and digital work platforms. As soon as one enters a physical working environment, they will find paper notes on desktops, in the office kitchen, in meeting rooms, workshops or store areas, etc. Their ubiquity and wide range of functions make them an interesting object of research for various disciplines, including management and organizational studies, anthropology (e.g., Dundes&Pagter 1992), or applied linguistics. Within linguistics, small texts have recently come more to the fore as a research object (e.g., Pappert&Roth 2021; Svennevig 2021). However, there are hardly any linguistic studies on such text formats of organizational communication so far (e.g., Ogiermann&Bella 2021).
Our project adopts an ethnographic perspective and aims to investigate the discursive practices that paper notes serve or reflect in organizational contexts. For this purpose, we have started to collect paper notes from various workplaces in Austria and Germany, e.g., offices in companies, universities, schools, public authorities, doctors' surgeries, or craft workshops. Methodologically, we have adopted a pragmatic approach to paper notes and focus on speech acts, multimodality, emergent topics and discourses, discursive strategies (e.g., humor), as well as the linguistic features that characterize them.
Our findings suggest that paper notes in organizations are often used for regulatory purposes, i.e., to demand certain behaviors. Furthermore, they are a means of self-expression and, as such, they can take different forms (e.g., witty statements about one's work performance, direct or indirect criticism, comments on the working atmosphere, or one's role within a subgroup). Sometimes, they also play a role in measuring and improving team performance. Hence, paper notes are a discursive arena in which members of an organization negotiate norms, expectations, and relationships, or communicate their attitudes to these. From an ethnographic perspective, they are also interesting, as they do not necessarily reflect an organization's espoused cultural values, in the sense of Schein (2004). On the contrary, they often express consent or dissent with an organization's official culture and thus point to the enacted culture (Keyton 2005: 181-183). In our presentation, we will explore and characterize several types of paper notes. Based on this, we will discuss to what extent they are products of the enacted organizational culture and can be used by practitioners as clues for the analysis of organizational culture.
References
Dundes, Alan & Carl R. Pagter. 1992. Work hard and you shall be rewarded: Urban folklore from the paperwork empire. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Keyton, Joann. 2005. Communication & Organizational Culture. A key to understanding work experiences. Sage.
Ogiermann, Eva & Spyridoula Bella. 2021. On the dual role of expressive speech acts: Relational work on signs announcing closures during the Covid-19 pandemic. Journal of Pragmatics 184/1: 1-17.
Pappert, Steffen & Kersten S. Roth (Hrsg.). 2021. Kleine Texte. Peter Lang D.
Schein, Edgar 2004. Organizational culture and leadership (3rd edition). Jossey-Bass.
Svennevig, J. 2021. How to do things with signs. The formulation of directives on signs in public spaces. Journal of Pragmatics 175: 165-183.
