Communication dilemmas and race in an Asian American Chamber of Commerce

ABSTRACT

This paper uses grounded practical theory (GPT) to examine how members of a pan-Asian organization manage dilemmas surrounding race and the workplace. An action implicative discourse analysis of 20 hours of audio-recorded meeting interactions among members of an Asian American Chamber of Commerce (AACC) reveals two dilemmas: how to maintain solidarity among an ethnically diverse group and how to communicate a racialized business identity to external corporate donors. Participants managed dialectical tensions between similarities and difference through membership categorization, metadiscourse, humor, and code-switching. Analysis illustrates that AACC practices operate from a locus of difference that values ‘diversity’ as a shared identity and provides leeway for creatively constructing difference. This paper extends GPT as a framework that highlights race as central to communication problems in the workplace and discusses how a better understanding of complexities of Asian American identity negotiation can offer practical insights into present-day race relations and diversity initiatives.

KEYWORDS:

• Asian American
• race
• discourse analysis
• organization
• identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘Black’ and ‘Hispanic’ are labels chosen by those organizations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natasha Shrikant

Natasha Shrikant is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She uses ethnography and discourse analysis to analyze (a) how minoritized groups negotiate racial and ethnic identities in institutional contexts and (b) how meanings of “racism” are constituted and contested in public discourse.

Dana Harrington Marshall

Dana Marshall is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Communication at Cal Poly Pomona. Her work focuses on organizational policies in practice using the Communicative Constitution of Organizations as a metatheoretical framework. She uses ethnography and discourse analysis to examine the situated intricacies of authority and organizational identity.