In this book, Janet Holmes sets out to “explore some of the diverse ways in which women and men in a number of mainly white-collar, professional, New Zealand organizations manage workplace discourse, and illustrate how they respond to the varied contextual conditions and communicative demands of their different ‘communities of practice.’ ” She accomplishes this goal and more.

Each chapter of the book provides a clear theoretical framework that focuses on a different aspect of gendered language. Holmes presents multiple examples to illustrate her points. Her valuable insights about gendered language allow for accessible understanding of the background that brings Holmes to her analysis. The chapters each work as stand-alone, theoretically grounded readings, but read together, they provide a fairly comprehensive overview of the field, with in-depth coverage of gendered language within the context of the New Zealand workplace.

The first chapter delivers an extensive review of the literature, clearly situating the research within a social constructionist or “communities of practice” approach (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet Reference Eckert, McConnell-Ginet, Hall, Bucholtz and Moonwomon1992) and an interactional sociolinguistic analysis of gendered practices. This chapter is also where we get some insight into the methodology. Holmes briefly describes her ethnographic approach, which used data collected for the Wellington Language in the Workplace (LWP) project. While it would have been useful to give more attention to the methods, this introductory chapter is in itself a valuable addition to the field in that it provides a comprehensive, scholarly, and entirely readable summary of current approaches and sets the stage for understanding the rest of the book.

In chap. 2 Holmes supplies many short examples, as well as a longer case study of one manager, with clear analyses of each in order to illustrate a number of gendered ways of “doing leadership” (43). In this chapter she begins the process of systematically pulling together pieces of her research (e.g., Holmes Reference Holmes and Wodak1997, Reference Holmes2000, Reference Holmes, De Fina, Schiffrin and Bamberg2005a, Reference Holmes and Lazar2005b) along with that of other researchers (e.g., Bergvall Reference Bergvall, Bergvall, Bing and Free1996, Coates Reference Coates, Johnson and Meinhof1997, Kendall & Tannen Reference Kendall, Tannen and Wodak1997, Vine Reference Vine2004) in order to create a clear picture of feminine/masculine style continua for conducting business.

Holmes uses Fletcher's (Reference Fletcher1999) concept of Relational Practices (RP) to frame the third chapter. She continues to examine concepts from the gendered practices literature and begins to incorporate the literature from organizational communication. She starts the chapter by clearly defining relational practice, using a number of examples from the LWP corpus. After insightful analysis about how people conduct relational practice according to Fletcher's framework, Holmes problematizes Fletcher's concept of RP as feminine by providing convincing examples of masculine ways of conducting RP.

Chap. 4 examines humor in the workplace. It is in this chapter that Holmes verges on examining differences between men and women. These differences, however, are framed within the discussion of normative behavior rather than making claims that women or men “do humor” in certain ways. This chapter explores two continua simultaneously. The first is the propositional orientation, which relates to the content of the message and goes from “supportive” to “contestive.” The second continuum examines participants' stylistic orientation, which refers to the way in which humor is constructed and runs from “collaborative” to “non-collaborative.” This chapter provides one example of the problem of missing discussion of methodology. There are particular examples that left this reader wondering how Holmes constructed her approach to the analysis. For example, example 4.15 (p. 133) examines men and women discussing “a good bloke.” As part of Holmes' analysis, she says that “women and men have recognized in the course of the exchange that they have rather different views about at least some of the characteristics of ‘a good bloke’” (135). I would argue that the men in the interaction recognize and agree with the women's stance that the man in question might not be an entirely good bloke and that he might be more part of the “good old boys' club” than a truly good man would be. Although they are teasing the women, the gender lines that they are drawing seem to be artificial ones in that the men are bringing the subject of sexism forward to point out the conflict with the man's affiliations.

Chap. 5 goes on to inspect ways of disagreeing. In this chapter Holmes focuses on the ways in which linguistic choices for disagreement construct a gendered workplace environment. This chapter comes into clear conflict with the ways in which gendered language has previously been defined. She effectively demonstrates the multiplicity of interpretations and uses of differently gendered interaction styles. She examines strategies such as avoidance and negotiation, but stops short at offering judgment about what works and what does not work.

Chap. 6 is the final chapter of direct analysis. Here Holmes focuses on the ways in which participants use narrative to construct their identities, further workplace cultural norms, and in some cases resist dominant workplace norms or reconcile conflicting professional identities. Holmes argues persuasively that narrative, like humor, provides women (and men) in leadership positions a chance to reconcile a normatively feminine identity with their authoritative (normatively masculine) roles. This chapter offers a clear example of how the lack of methodological explanation brings up questions with regard to the analysis. Holmes uses this example (ex. 6.10), from a conversation among male co-workers about how one of them likes to visit restaurant kitchens, to illustrate a normatively masculine narrative:

This example seems problematic on a number of levels. If the definition of narrative is what we would intuitively expect (the telling of a specific event), then it is somewhat unclear how this example serves to illustrate a narrative, in that the references to any actual occurrence or event are indirect at best. Furthermore, the co-constructed nature of the interaction seems normatively feminine, rather than masculine as Holmes seems to be arguing. The content of the humor is intuitively masculine but is not examined with reference to a clearly defined continuum. If Holmes had provided the methodological steps to her analysis, we might come to the same conclusion, but without a specific taxonomy, the example raises questions.

Holmes concludes the book with a chapter entitled “Giving women the last word.” Here she provides clear and convincing discussion about how leaders in the workplace can use the various methods of integrating normatively feminine and masculine strategies to effectively construct their identities within a range of workplace cultures.

Throughout the book, Holmes offers insightful analyses of both content and linguistic features. She avoids comparing men and women, focusing on the ways men and women both choose from among various gendered discourse choices to construct and enact their identities and further their goals. While this choice is certainly dead-on with current theories of gendered language, each chapter leaves readers to question whether some of these choices were more effective than others within their particular communities of practice. The final chapter explains that one of Holmes's goals is to provide alternatives to the current stereotypes in order to establish normatively feminine ways of effective leadership. In order to meet that goal, it would have been useful to have more information about how effective the various alternatives were, and additionally to know if they were equally effective when used by men and women. Certainly within any community of practice we see people with a range of approaches to interaction, and we realize that not all of those approaches are equally effective. Holmes makes few judgments about the various styles she describes, except to say that some people are more or less comfortable with them. If the book were to be truly useful to leaders making choices about how to construct their identities, it seems that we would need to know the outcomes of the brief excerpts.

While Holmes presents a fairly extensive description of the corpus, her approach to examining the data is ultimately unclear. Her methods are never provided in a way that would be usable for subsequent analyses. Each chapter includes a great deal of information on the theoretical underpinnings of the analysis, but each leaves many aspects of the research design to the readers' imaginations. How does Holmes define and choose examples of conflict, humor, narrative, and so on? What is she leaving out? What are the definitions of the specific linguistic features to which she refers? (She often refers to gendered linguistic features such as hedges and intensifiers that support her analysis, but those features are defined only through example.)

Taken as a whole, the book is a valuable resource in the field of sociolinguistics. Holmes once again effectively examines gendered language in the workplace and provides clear ties to current theoretical frameworks. The only real shortcoming of the book is the lack of transparent taxonomies of analyses.