Relating at work: Facets, dialectics and face

This article examines ‘relating at work’. Recent theorising in pragmatics has drawn attention to the importance of analysing relations, and yet the pragmatic study of relations is now intertwined so closely with the concept of face (e.g. Arundale, 2010a, Holmes et al., 2011, Locher and Watts, 2005 and Locher and Watts, 2008) that it might seem the two are synonymous. In this paper, I review this research from a multidisciplinary perspective and argue that relating should be studied in its own right, not always through the lens of face. I then report a study on ‘relating at work’ which had the following aims: (a) to investigate employees’ ‘grassroots’ perspectives on relating at work; (b) to explore ways in which their perspectives can be conceptualised, examining the applicability and relative usefulness of Relational Dialectic Theory and how this relates to face; and (c) to reflect on the relative importance of the cognitive in the pragmatic analysis of relations. I conclude by arguing that Relational Dialectic Theory and Face Theory offer valuable analytic perspectives that are complementary to each other, and calling for more research into the broader issue of relating at work.