Cultural terms and tensions in the speech at a television station

Abstract

The speech of employees at a television station is investigated from a cultural perspective, demonstrating its situated meaningfulness to those who create it, its relative inaccessibility to outsiders, and an understanding of how to discover such meanings. The study explicates a local system of symbols, forms, and meanings, consisting of “different types of people,”; “the building situation,”; “tensions,”; “the communication problem,”; and “the product.”; The problem of interpreting such local meanings is solved, in this case, through an investigation of symbols about persons and communication, and a description of their relation to an epitomizing symbol. Thus, the relative inaccessibility of organizational speech is here made accessible by the ethnographer's use of a specific cultural approach. Qualities and prospects of such ethnographic inquiry are discussed.

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