Culture, Communication, and Cooperation: Interpersonal Relations and Pronominal Address in a Mexican Organization

A treatment of communication and effectiveness in organizations. Patricia Covarrubias presents an ethnographic study of approximately 550 workers in a Mexican industrial organization in Veracruz. She studies the complex interpersonal networks formed and destroyed by language subtleties, specifically forms of personal address ( tu and usted ) and draws larger conclusions about language, culture and social interaction in businesses and organizations.