Schnurr & Zayts’ eight-chapter book explores the extent to which culture may influence people's actual workplace behaviours, based on a corpus of 300+ verbal interactions (recorded in Hong Kong workplaces), ethnographic data, and written communication samples.

The first chapter lays the theoretical framework and methodological approach deployed throughout the book. The authors begin by discussing the essentialist and constructivist views on culture, and how the distinction between large and small cultures, politeness research, and the notion of community of practice underpin their discussions in the ensuing chapters. In particular, two key concepts are introduced: (i) ‘first-order culture’ (culture₁), that is, folk perceptions of the influence of culture on their workplace behaviours; and (ii) ‘second-order culture’ (culture₂), that is, how culture is constructed, enacted, and negotiated in actual interactions.

Following the introductory chapter, chs. 2 to 4 illustrate the culture₁–culture₂ discrepancy. Ch. 2, focusing on face and politeness, examines the ways interlocutors oriented to their own and addressees’ face wants when expressing upward refusals and disagreements, which contradict the folk belief that these face-threatening acts are avoided in communication. Moving from face and politeness to decision-making, ch. 3 discusses how team members actively contributed to a meeting and collaboratively reached agreements, thereby challenging the interview participants’ claim that decision-making was an entirely unilateral process. In ch. 4, which extends the previous chapter to leadership, the authors find that while the interview participants tended to describe the leadership behaviour they observed as predominantly top-down, co-leadership and team leadership styles are also evident in the interactional data.

Chs. 5 to 7 investigate the intersection of culture₁ and culture₂. Ch. 5 examines identity work by using constructivist conceptualisations of identity to demonstrate how participants constructed identities with reference to cultural₁ categories, their own affiliations, and the interactional contexts. Ch. 6 is concerned with gender. The global, gendered assumptions prevalent in Hong Kong workplaces are contrasted with the stories of two successful female entrepreneurs who enacted gender by juxtaposing masculine and feminine speech styles in interactions. Ch. 7 focuses on work-life balance. The authors maintain that although the interview participants’ cultural₁ views on this issue were somehow reflected in their actual workplace behaviours, it is indeed a global issue influenced by local-level factors such as organisational expectations and needs.

The concluding chapter highlights the main arguments made throughout the book. The authors suggest that the usefulness of both orders of culture be acknowledged and taken into consideration in intercultural communication research. In other words, investigating culture₁ can serve as a starting point that seeks to understand laymen perceptions of the role of culture in shaping workplace behaviours, followed by a fine-grained culture₂ analysis that illuminates the ways culture is discursively enacted in micro-level authentic interactions and the extent to which culture₁ influences culture₂.

Aimed towards general readers interested in workplace discourse, this book shows how (intercultural) communication research may draw insights from well-established concepts in discourse studies and interactional pragmatics to reveal the congruence and divergence between culture₁ and culture₂ in the workplace context.