Abstract

The study of culture in intercultural communication has often considered the national, and sometimes the ethnic, backgrounds of interactants as a baseline for the interpretation of communicational phenomena. However, when professionals from a number of different national and/or ethnic backgrounds have worked together for a considerable amount of years, they may have become members of a well-established community and, as a result, may have developed their own community culture. Thus, investigating culture from a downscaled perspective allows us to provide a detailed and locally situated consideration of those cultural aspects that define a group of work colleagues who, in spite of having different national and/or ethnic backgrounds, share a set of beliefs, discursive practices and ways of doing things in their workplace. This chapter then explores the professional culture of an intercultural group of nurses in a public hospital in New Zealand through the display of nursing values that emerge in reflections and negotiations of professional practice. The data for this study were collected in formal meetings where an average of ten nurses participated. Approached from a discursive analytic perspective, this study uses Interactional Sociolinguistics and Community of Practice as the frameworks that guide its methodology and analysis. Finally, this chapter shows how this group of nurses constructs multiple alignments at local and higher community scales as a cultural activity that helps them build their professional accountability.