“I've picked some up from a colleague”: language, sharing and communities of practice in an institutional setting

Abstract

This chapter examines interfaces between the notion of community of practice and the sociolinguistic study of a workplace. The workers are all police officers, and the chapter focuses on one tiny aspect of their working lives: the statement and explanation of the right to silence to people under arrest. This focus makes it possible to see how a routine, pervasive work task permeates and becomes permeated by communities of practice. By focussing on one discrete activity which is common to a large organisation, and performed through talk, I am also able to demonstrate how close study of language data can be informed by the community of practice framework and can, in turn, enrich the framework.