G'Day Boss!
Australian Culture & The Workplace
By Barbara A. West & Frances T. Murphy

How to work together: adapting to an intercultural workplace
A new book offers advice and a valuable perspective on the changing Australian workplace

I imagine there will be little argument from readers of this website that the Australian workplace has become increasingly diverse and that the issues raised by the authors of G’day Boss! Australian Culture and the Workplace are vital. How we are to work together – as colleagues, bosses and subordinates, or simply as friends and neighbours – has never been such a pressing concern. What models we use to think about these challenges – assimilation, integration, adaptation – are also of course prominent in debate about the nature of Australia’s multicultural society, although when framed in the public sphere often tend to foster confusion rather than clarity or the spread of new ideas.

It is therefore a relief to find this clear, concise and very readable account of how we might think about working together, in which authors Barbara West and Frances Murphy argue that both migrants and Australia-born workers need to adapt, and that the best way to do this is through greater intercultural understanding. Drawing on key authors and theories in the field of cultural anthropology and intercultural communication, they argue that intercultural adaptation leads to better and more productive relationships both in the workplace and the wider social sphere.

Rather than provide an academic or overly theoretical account of intercultural adaptation, however, the aim of their book is to focus on practice rather than theory and real world interaction in order to inform prospective and recently-arrived migrants about some of the quirks of the Australian workplace (of which I was convinced there are many!) based on their understanding of the contemporary power of western communication forms and value constructs. Just as importantly, perhaps, the authors also aim to develop self-awareness among Australia-born workers, both of their own cultural peculiarities and of the needs of new arrivals.

In many ways this must have been a tricky book to write. How do you generalise about workplace culture and experience in a way that avoids stereotype or bland cliché? How do you generalise about and describe culture? These are issues tackled at the start of the book, which is divided into three sections. The early chapters address this necessary groundwork of understanding culture, defining key terms and underlining the authors’ focus on cognitive and behavioural aspects of culture – the mental mechanisms people use to classify, categorise and interpret information. The authors emphasise the ways in which culture’s learned, shared and changing dimensions pattern the whole field of workplace relationships, and how these ‘must be recognised, studied and understood to be at the centre of organisational management and change’ (7).

One excellent feature of this text is the way that the authors manage to illuminate the role of Australian national culture, subcultures and aspects of ethnocentrism in a way that avoids the pitfalls of stereotype or over-generalisation. Some degree of generalisation is necessary, they argue, in order to discuss culture and understand the beliefs and behaviours of groups of people; but this should always be conceived in terms of a ‘hypothesis that can be revised through further observation or experience’ (19). It is the chief value of this book, perhaps, that the authors practice what they preach, as all of their subsequent chapters invite and provide room for change on the basis of what they emphasise as necessary for intercultural adaptation: ongoing observation, self-awareness and experimentation.

This is particularly apparent in the second section of the book, which outlines the values and relationships most clearly manifest in the Australian workplace. Again, the value of these chapters is that they draw on observation, experience and the voices of migrant and Australia-born workers, so that it maintains a sense of perspective and never descends into stereotype, while still pursuing its goal of offering useful generalisations about the nature of Australian workplaces. The discussion of relationships within the workplace is particularly informative, providing nuanced and yet clear and useful understandings of factors such as equality vs hierarchy, informality vs formality, and individualism vs collectivism. The authors use anecdotal evidence from interviewees to underline clearly the ways in which all characterisation is a matter of perspective, but what emerges are some subtle and (I would argue) accurate observations about the contradictions within, and relational nature of, any discussion of Australia as an egalitarian society. As one migrant from Brazil observes: ‘I really appreciate the mixing between levels because I think it’s good for an organization. However, it can also be hard because you can forget your position when out socialising and make a mistake. Hierarchy is subtle, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there’ (33).

Other important value contrasts identified in subsequent chapters explore such issues as attitudes to conflict, competition vs cooperation, change vs tradition, youth vs age, religion vs secularism and orientations toward time. All of these include, alongside useful guidance for the newly arrived migrant, some insights about the development of workplace culture in Australia over the last few decades that should make all of us pause for thought. The authors’ discussion of the shift towards a much stronger culture of individualism in many workplaces, for example, or recent moves to fund religious organizations to engage in social welfare activities that were once the purview of secular, government agencies, should raise the self-awareness of the Australia-born worker about changes to their own culture.

The final section of the book provides the most practical ‘how to’ information. Here the authors set out their key advice for effective intercultural communication, including some of the theoretical underpinnings for their ideas, including work by Milton Bennett and Edward T Hall. They discuss various communication styles, including linear vs circular, direct vs indirect, attached vs detached, intellectual vs relational and low context vs high context. I learnt a lot about my own communication style and, as elsewhere in the book, the anecdotal reports from migrants offer considerable insight and expertise. One Sudanese worker, for example, offered the following observation about attached vs detached forms of communication in the workplace (crudely, an ‘objective’ vs emotional response):
I see a lot of people with stress at work because we deal with demanding customers all the time and my co-workers just hold that stress inside them and it gets worse. They seem to have a screen in front of their faces and don’t want other people to get through it. In my support role, I get a lot of clients who are really stressed too, who even say really racist things to me, but I just relax and talk to them as though I didn’t hear what they said and by the end they are laughing with me. It’s about being human with them and not shutting off (97).

Also addressed are issues such as tone and volume, silence, touch, eye contact, hand and body movement, physical distance or space, timing, paralanguage or extralinguistic noises (ums, errs, etc).

It is towards that end of the book also that West and Murphy clarify their position on adaptation and the meaning of interculturalism, underlining that the book should be used as a tool to assist migrants to Australia to comprehend the behavioural traits of Australian value and communication structures, but that the authors ‘leave it up to [the migrant/reader] to consider the degree to which adaptation benefits and/or subjugates them to the power inherent in these structures’ (88).

This last insight is particularly valuable as it points to something crucial about this book: its emphasis on the process of adaptation that highlights change within and between cultures and individuals through intercultural exchange; and the importance of the quality of relationships through which this might take place. There is an interesting observation by one of the interviewees on this issue:
From my perspective, the entire Australian economy revolves around relationships. Whether you call it comradeship, mateship or something else, it is definitely important to understand that being connected to others is of paramount importance to many Australians…

Another area that highlights this importance of relationships is the way Australians define ‘quality’. For the Japanese, quality equals perfection; in France it denotes luxury, while in the United States quality denotes large size. In Australia, quality is about two different things, functionality on the one hand – if it works then it has quality – and relationships on the other. Australians think of organizations as having quality if they have relationships with them or the individuals involved in them. (42)

I would argue (or at least hope) that this applies also to our relationships within a workplace… but of course Australian workplace culture has been changing dramatically over the last few decades. At the same time that I was reading G’day Boss! my workplace was also being ‘restructured’ and I found myself re-reading Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, first published in 1998. At the start of this book, Sennett reflects on workplaces that value short-term over long-term benefits and their impact on social relationships; how can a human being develop a narrative of identity and life history, Sennett asks, in a society composed of episodes and fragments? Newcomers to Australia reading West and Murphy’s book are encouraged – I would argue very valuably – to develop a narrative of identity by understanding the context and patterns of culture, reflecting on people’s adaptive capacity, but developing also a sense of increased cultural self-awareness and the value of understanding perspective. The authors’ final key pieces of advice for adaptation in the workplace emphasise: awareness of your own ethnocentrism, developing relationships, networking as much as possible, and perhaps above all having a sense of humour, and giving yourself time.

G'Day Boss! Australian Culture & The Workplace By Barbara West & Frances Murphy Tribus lingua 2007 146 pp Paperback Version $37.00 978-0-9757560-9-6

   About Dr Sara Wills                                                        
Dr Sara Wills is a lecturer in Australian Studies at the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne. Born in the UK, she migrated to Australia as a teenager in the 1980s and was educated at the University of Melbourne, where she completed a BA(Hons) and PhD in History. She has since worked in publishing and museums as well as academia and, while maintaining a keen interest in history and memory, now works more broadly in an interdisciplinary Australian Studies context.

Sara’s most recent research relates to Australian migrant hospitality, particular sites of migrant memory and histories, and contemporary questions of migrancy and national identity in Australia. Her current projects include an investigation of the hostel accommodation and services provided to post-war migrants in Australia entitled 'Hostels, Hosts and Hospitality'. In particular, Sara is particularly interested in the ways people manage the experience of loss, and in the processes of 're-placing' senses of community, culture and identity.