Disagreeing without being disagreeable: Negotiating workplace communities as an outsider

Disagreement is an important socio-pragmatic skill for the workplace context, and newcomers risk causing offence if they fail to adhere to community norms. Applying a Community of Practice framework, embedded in broader societal constraints, I argue the relevance of group norms and shared practices for establishing how and whether disagreement occurs. Focussing on skilled migrant interns entering the New Zealand workplace, the analysis illustrates ways in which these newcomers are unintentionally hindered in their ability to learn and contribute to community norms. Their interlocutors’ failure to endorse their attempts to disagree serves to thwart their socio-pragmatic development. In the examples, the role of co-construction in disagreement, and the interactive nature of these events, is thus highlighted. Because all participants play a part in the ongoing (re)negotiation of the norms of a Community of Practice, a hypothesised ‘tolerance’ by in-group members in the interactions (whereby disagreements are reinterpreted as unintentional errors) means that these skilled migrants are restricted in their access to their new communities.