Core project team
Meredith Marra
Meredith is Director of the LWP and is currently Professor in Linguistics in School of Language, Social & Political Sciences, University of Canterbury (see https://profiles.canterbury.ac.nz/Meredith-Marra). Her research interests include a range of aspects of the discourse of meetings as well as the uses and functions of humour in workplace interactions. The focus of her 2003 PhD was decision-making in business meetings.
Meredith is co-author of Leadership, Discourse, and Ethnicity (2011, OUP) with the Language in the Workplace team, and co-editor of Constructing Identities at Work (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Negotiating Boundaries at Work (2017, EUP) and Linguist at Work (2017, VUP).
Janet Holmes
Janet established the Language in the Workplace Project and was Director from 1996 until 2015 when she retired. She is currently the Associate Director of the Project.
She has been involved in all aspects of the Project's work, including research design and supervising data collection, as well as data analysis and writing. Janet's own particular areas of interest include the use of humour and small talk in workplace communication, the construction of professional identity, the language of managers, leadership and communication and the role of gender in workplace relationships and interaction.
Janet’s workplace related publications include three books - Leadership, Discourse, and Ethnicity (2011, OUP) with Meredith Marra and Bernadette Vine, Gendered Talk at Work (2006, Wiley-Blackwell) and Power and Politeness in the Workplace (2003, Pearson Education) with Maria Stubbe (2nd edition, 2015, Routledge). Her textbook An Introduction to Sociolinguistics is into its sixth edition (2022, Routledge) (currently co-authored with Nick Wilson)
Bernadette Vine
Bernadette is Senior Researcher and Corpus Manager for the LWP, which includes management of the project’s data collection, processing, transcription, archiving and databases. Her research interests include leadership, how people balance the relational and transactional aspects of workplace communication, and New Zealand English.
Bernadette’s workplace publications include Leadership, Discourse, and Ethnicity (2011, OUP) co-authored with Janet Holmes and Meredith Marra, and Getting Things Done at Work (2004, John Benjamins) based on her PhD thesis. She also edited The Routledge Handbook of Language in the Workplace (2018, Routledge) and has written two introductory textbooks – Introducing Language in the Workplace (2020, CUP) and Understanding Discourse Analysis (2023, Routledge).