Goffman’s theory of self and the social order: trust and conflict in an intercultural education workplace

Abstract

This chapter focuses on intercultural education workplaces, and the roles that trust and distrust, as enacted through discourse, play in the establishment and maintenance of a functioning and collaborative work environment. As Sarangi and Roberts (1999) have argued, a workplace functions through its communicative practices and regulation of these ‘controls access to the workplace and opportunities within’ (p.1). With globalisation bringing different cultural groups together in the workplace, understanding how a community of participants from diverse backgrounds form and discoursally enact a cooperative, and hence productive, work environment, has become an area of some interest (Chan & Goto 2003; Ting-Toomey 2006). Lewicki (2006) contends that while the concept of trust has received attention in various branches of the social science literature, little regard has been paid to articulating a more inclusive understanding of the key role that trust plays in critical social processes such as cooperation and collaboration. We use Goffman’s analytic concepts of ‘presentation of self’ and ‘interaction order’ to focus on a Japanese tertiary education setting in which lecturers from several different countries work in the same department to teach academic English language to undergraduates and collaborate on curriculum development projects. The lecturers come together with different expectations and experiences of teaching in Japan, and also of being involved in an international, professional working context, factors suggested as possible sources of conflict (Scollon & Scollon 2001; Ting-Toomey 2006; Torpey 2003).