Learning to talk: from manual work to discourse work as self‐regulating practice

Abstract

In the new work order, more and more work is talk, and much of the new kinds of textual or discourse work that employees, including production line workers, are undertaking, is enacted during team meetings. Learning to be a team member involves learning to talk. This paper presents ethnographic and discourse data from a large, Australian manufacturing workplace to argue that central to the participatory practices of working in teams is the development of discursive networks of participation, constructed to elicit “bottom up” engagement with work‐related problems and issues, and produce offers of worker involvement, rather than relying on more traditional, “top down” management commands and control of workplace knowledge. In the case presented here, the team members are production line workers from different areas of the workplace and thus they hold, and (can) contribute, different kinds of knowledge to the team meetings. The developing discourses of offers and suggestions for improvements can be seen as producing self‐regulating (organisational) workers.