- Email: [email protected]
Constructing Identities at Work
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics 68 (2014) 94--98 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Book review Constructing Identities at Work Jo Angouri and Meredith Marra (Eds.), Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2012, 248 pp., ISBN: 978-0-23027237-8, $125.00 (hardback) Constructing Identities at Work presents a selection of most recent research on identity construction in various professional and institutional settings. The book includes a Foreword, Notes on Contributors, eleven chapters grouped in three thematic parts and an index. In the Foreword, Bargiela-Chappini observes that the interest in professional identities is recent, particularly from the discursive perspective, having increased since 1990s. The author comments on the elusive and ambiguous nature of identity, both as a word and a concept, and reflects on the most recent approaches, labels and understandings of identity and identification in social theory and discourse-based studies, including professional and business discourses. The author emphasizes that the present collection of papers is ‘‘the first volume, as far as I know, that concentrates on the construction of professional identities as they emerge through the performance of everyday work practices’’ (p. x), and ‘‘will become a point of reference for future research’’ (p. x). Chapter 1 (Meredith Marra and Jo Angouri, Investigating the Negotiation of Identity: A View from the Field of Workplace Discourse) presents an overview of the book. The authors mention shared themes, introduce key concepts in identity theories, recent developments in understanding identity construction at work and provide summaries of the chapters. They observe that the contributors successfully adopt a broadened view on professional identity and bring together different approaches and methodologies in order to provide various perspectives on identity construction and research. Finally, they conclude that ‘‘the collection does not aim to create an orthodoxy for the study of identity, but instead [aims] to pave the way for raising and problematizing issues of common concern and to encourage diversity of views’’ (p. 11). Part I on Leadership identity in Business Contexts consists of four chapters which focus on different aspects of the construction of leadership identity, mostly in the context of a meeting in a corporate workplace. Chapter 2 (Jan Svennevig, Leadership Style in Managers’ Feedback in Meetings) investigates professional identity of senior managers. The data come from a corpus of videorecorded management meetings in a large Scandinavian company. The study takes a Conversation Analytic approach and focuses on three instances of senior managers’ feedback responses to reports. The analysis describes the actions and practices of feedback responses, their internal structure and stylistic features, how they construct interpersonal relations, the leadership style and the professional identity of a leader. The feedback responses contain three main actions: diagnosing the situation, evaluating the subordinates, and giving directions for future action, all of them central to a professional identity and a leadership style. For instance, in the case of negative evaluations, the managers may mitigate them upgrading the positive aspects, or leave them unmitigated, using a confrontational and accusatory tone. In the analyzed extracts, the differences in leadership styles consist of: promoting team identity, in-group solidarity and personal relations in the first extract, foregrounding organizational identity, the manager’s superior knowledge, strong opinions and clear directions in the second, and promoting individuality and independence in the group in the third. These differences are also analyzed in terms of three dimensions: knowledge (the epistemic aspect involving authority), communicative rights and obligations (the social relations of solidarity or dominance), and emotion (displays of closeness and sympathy or unmitigated criticism and hostility). In Svennevig’s study, identity emerges as a relational concept and a leadership style consists of the different ways managers use to contribute to establishing relations in the meetings. The study is a contribution to empirical investigation of leadership as practice, and to leadership identity as jointly construed by participants in interaction. Chapter 3 (Stephanie Schnurr and Olga Zayts, Be(com)ing a Leader: A Case Study of Co-Constructing Professional Identities at Work) examines the identity of a newly promoted team-leader as negotiated and co-constructed in discourse. The authors take a social constructionist perspective and define leadership as a dynamic performance and a relational phenomenon, co-constructed between the leaders and the people they work with. The authors apply two principles of
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.05.006 0378-2166/
Book review
95
identity construction (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005), the relational principle and the indexicality principle (the indexed identity categories being ‘leader’ or ‘boss’). The data consist of video-recordings of six weekly meetings of an administrative team at a Hong Kong company, supplemented by interviews, participant observation, organizational documents, in line with a multi-method approach developed by the Language in the Workplace (LWP) project (Holmes and Stubbe, 2003). An in-depth case study of a newly promoted leader of a small administrative team, Cheryl, focuses on how leadership identities are conjointly created, negotiated and contested by the team members. While Cheryl was successfully constructing herself as the leader, opening and closing the meetings, being in charge of the agenda and staying involved in the decision-making processes, occasionally other members attempted to deconstruct her leader position. The authors conclude that constructing leader identities is not always a harmonious process and may involve complex antagonistic and challenging discourses. They argue that ‘‘it is particularly in these moments of interactional struggles and challenges that interactional identities are created and formed’’ (p. 57). The analysis demonstrates that professional identities are multiple and shift dynamically, always in relation to the identities of other interlocutors. Chapter 4 (Pamela Rogerson-Revell, Chairing International Business Meetings: Investigating Humour and Leadership Style in the Workplace) examines the role of the chair in international business meetings and investigates the use of humor as a discursive strategy constructing leadership identity. The study takes a social constructionist perspective on social identity, adopts interactional sociolinguistics as an analytical framework and a CA approach to context. The analysis reveals that humor is a sophisticated discursive tool to do both ‘power’ (for instance, managing face threats) and ‘solidarity’ (creating a team, developing relationships). The corpus consists of meeting recordings collected from two international organizations, one in Hong Kong (HK meetings) and the other one in Europe (EU meetings). The dominant function of humor used by the EU meeting chairs is relational (getting things done while maintaining solidarity and collegiality), while the HK meetings differ in chairing style and the use of humor. All the chairs use humor both relationally and transactionally, and there is also evidence of humor being used in a transformational way, to generate new ideas and solve problems. Also, the meeting chairs differ in the use of humor depending on what they consider to be appropriate interactive behavior in a particular context. The author concludes that ‘‘the ability to construct an appropriate leadership style, whether through the use of humor or other interactive strategies, to be able to accommodate the needs and expectations of a linguistically and socio-culturally diverse group, is a potentially powerful leadership skill and one which is of particular benefit to chairs of international workplace meetings’’ (p. 81). Chapter 5 (Jo Angouri and Meredith Marra, ‘OK one last thing for today then’: Constructing Identities in Corporate Meeting talk’) focuses on the ways meeting chairs construct their identity through floor management and the handling of meeting agendas as means of displaying roles and identities within a corporate meeting context. The authors take a social constructionist stance and employ the Communities of Practice (CofP) approach in order to illuminate the interplay between local (micro) practices and the wider (macro) corporate context. The audio/video-recorded data were collected in Europe and New Zealand, using the procedures of the Wellington Language in the Workplace (LWP) project (Holmes and Stubbe, 2003). Both the European and New Zealand data show senior or General Managers acting as chairs in formal and informal meetings or discussions. In the formal meetings the chair identity is overt, explicit, that of an outsider, their status seen in facilitating the meetings with pre-allocated turns (such as OK thanks everyone for coming). In informal meetings chairs, often not formally nominated, construct themselves as helpful and supportive leaders. The formal and informal meetings differ in floor management and in both the participants orient toward the mutual understanding of the role of the chair and of how corporate meetings work. The chair power is negotiated and discursively constructed (e.g. their decisions are acknowledged, their humor is positively responded to). As there are striking similarities in the ways chair identities are constructed in corporate meeting talk the authors suggest a genre perspective should be considered for future research. Part II, entitled Rhetoric, Expertise and Ideology in Identity Construction consists of two papers which share the common focus on rhetoric means used in identity construction. Chapter 6 (Veronika Koller, Hard-working, team-oriented individuals’: Constructing professional Identities incorporate Mission Statements) examines how the language and rhetoric of mission statements construct professional identities for employees. The chapter suggests a new area of research in that it applies the discourse-historical approach (elements of systemic-functional grammar and classical rhetoric) to corporate discourse. The genre of mission statement is viewed as a management tool, which promotes corporate culture and ethos, functions to motivate staff and their loyalty, and constructs professional identities as ideal selves which reflect values and goals of corporate decision-makers. Systemic functional grammar is the basis for a qualitative analysis of representations of social actors in the sample texts and how they are positioned vis-à-vis the company. The data consist of a large corpus of words of texts from the companies of the 2003 Fortune Global 5000, analyzed for the most common labels for employees as social actors (e.g. personnel, staff, human resources), and for frequencies, collocates and concordance with semantic domains. Selected samples of mission statements were further analyzed for
96
Book review
transitivity, attribution and modality. The findings demonstrate that some semantic domains, such as ‘emotions’ and ‘ethics’, were overrepresented in the mission statements, the function of which was to build an affective company-stakeholder relationship and present the company as credible. While the combination of systemic functional grammar and classical rhetoric can inspire further research, the author suggests that corpus and text analysis could be combined with ethnomethodological and conversation analytical approaches to investigate how the employees co-construct their own identities and resist professional identities constructed in corporate genres. Chapter 7 (Eva-Maria Graf, ‘‘Yes then I will tell you maybe a little bit about the procedure’’ -- Constructing Professional Identity where there is not yet a Profession: the Case of Executive Coaching) examines how two coaches and their clients establish and negotiate the coach identity within a context which lacks a clear framework of professional coaching knowledge and routines. The author applies an integrative method, combining Conversation Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, pragmatics and interactional sociolinguistics. The data come from the recordings of an executive coaching approach (‘‘Emotional Intelligence Coaching’’) carried out in Germany. The analysis revealed that the lack of shared understanding of the nature of coaching as a professional helping encounter leads the coaches to a more explicit negotiation of the activity with their clients. For instance, the coaches initiated explicit meta-discourse about how they understand coaching and their role and responsibilities. They distanced themselves from psychotherapy, attuning with the clients’ wishes, and projected themselves as knowledgeable, credible and loyal supporters of the clients, who act independently from the paying company. The topicalization of methodological, conceptual and procedural issues helped the coaches construct shared meanings upon the uptake from their clients. Although the scope of the analysis does not allow for generalizations, the author concludes that coaching interaction differs from more established professional practices in that the construction of professional and institutional world takes place frontstage. The author predicts that once executive coaching is established as a profession with institutional routines and shared practices, these concerns will lose their frontstage position. Part III, entitled Professional Identities in Institutional contexts consists of four papers, three of which focus on identity construction in various workplace environments and the last one address the issue of the professional identity of the researcher. Chapter 8 (Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Teachers, Students and Ways of Telling in Classroom Sites: A Case of Out-of(Work) Place Identities) explores the construction of teachers’ and students’ identities in the life of a London school as part of the study entitled Urban Classroom Culture and Interaction. The study reveals a high number of PNMC (popular and new media culture) engagements as part of peer-talk in class (having the mobile phone on, imitating TV series characters, meta-talk about music videos) which are not connected with the classroom instruction. The author uses a multi-method approach to data collection (ethnographic observations, radio-mic recordings, interviews, questionnaires, playback sessions, participants’ meta-commentaries) and develops a practice-based heuristics which connects ways of telling (students’ peer talk and PMNS engagements are routine ways of telling), sites or social spaces (the classroom), and the students as tellers. This evidence shows that PNMC engagements have symbolic capital for the participants and emerge as a field for the struggle over resources. The classroom is redefined as a polycentric or bi-centric space, and a teacher-led order occasionally clashes with a peer-order. The students occasionally display resistance to the teacher’s instructions or requests to abandon their PNMC engagements, and resist the teachers’ attempts to join in the peer-talk, perceived as ‘their’ (the students’) activity. Identity-wise, while the teacher--student identity set remains relevant, PNMC engagements make other situated identities emerge (a friend, a peer group member or a PNMC user). The reflexive interviews revealed that both students and teachers experienced the tension between the actual and the apprehended identities in class. The author suggests that the findings bring in a new dimension to the discussion concerning the integration of new technologies into the curriculum: the teachers may nurture such independent spaces as students’ PNMC engagements, leaving them as controlled and regulated by the students themselves. Chapter 9 (Karen Tracy, Identity-Work I Appellate Oral Argument: Ideological Identities within a Professional One) demonstrates how oral argument discourse enacts and reflects the professional identity of US state Supreme Court judges. The author defines appellate court as a highly specialized genre and describes its workings. Her central materials are video--audiotapes and transcripts of oral argument about same-sex marriage that occurred in eight states between 2005 and 2009. The analysis reveals that the identity of an appellate judge is enacted through three kinds of coordinated discourse moves: frame-constructing actions, lexical and speech act moves, and relational definers, constructing appellate judges as legal professionals engaged in doing oral argument. The appellate judges are systematically addressed as ‘‘your honor’’ or ‘‘chief justice’’, which constructs them as particularly high status professionals as compared to attorneys. They employ distinctive legal vocabulary (‘‘amicus brief’’), pervasively use argument meta-discourse terms (‘‘claim, evidence, argument’’) and neutrality markers in questions. They can ask questions whenever they choose, and initiate and manage
Book review
97
interruptions. Also, they frequently use hypothetical questions and unmitigated disagreement and do not use assessment moves. The analysis also revealed rarer moves that cued a particular ideological stance of appellate judges, when the judges engaged in evaluative discourse actions like story-telling questions that strongly supported the view of one party, used culturally loaded phrases that conveyed a strong sense of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and employed judge-initiated humor at the expense of one party. Tracy emphasizes the importance of studying identity-work in state supreme courts as sites of law-making. Also, the author suggests that gender performance in the appellate court as a non-gender attentive context may be an area of interest for future study. Chapter 10 (Keith Richards, Engaging Identities: Personal Disclosure and Professional Responsibility) explores how a new teacher seeks to establish his identity within the group of permanent staff members. The chapter draws on Conversation Analysis (CA) and the data come from a project studying staffroom talk in a small language school, where the author was a participant observer, took field notes, carried out interviews and made audio recordings and participated in meetings. The analysis focuses on an example of a contested identity, where a temporary teacher attempts to establish himself as an ‘experienced teacher’ referring to his previous experience and status. This creates a disjunction between his status as a temporary staff member in the language school and his ‘outside’ identity as an experienced senior professional. Also, his identity engagements distance him from the other staff members who collaboratively position him as an outsider (they use the exclusive ‘we’), who does not share the group’s common knowledge and does not recognize the non-hierarchical, collaborative workplace culture of the school. In sum, his identity construction efforts are not regarded as legitimate within that group. The author also explores the analytical implications of the outsider status of the new member, analyzing a deviant case, in which the new member’s unusual interactional behavior (the evidence of his suppressed identity as a fiancé) goes unnoticed by his colleagues, probably due to the unstable nature of his identity in the group. The analysis also suggests that identity may be at times the product of conscious design. In Chapter 11 (Anna de Fina, ‘‘We are not there. In fact we will go to the garden to take the rain’’: Researcher Identity and the Observer Paradox) the author argues that the constructionist approach to identity should be expanded to include the research context and interview- or researcher-generated data. As a research interview is an interactional event, it needs to be viewed as a source of data on social interaction, being both the ‘‘topic’’ and the ‘‘resource’’. The data for the analysis consist of videorecorded interviews with Italian Australian families in Melbourne, with special focus on how the family members orient to their situational identities as subjects of investigation (‘‘interviewees’’) and to their interlocutors’ identities as researchers (‘‘interviewers’’). The participant’s paradox (on par with the Observer paradox) often emerged in the absence of the researcher, when the family members displayed uncertainty and curiosity about their role in the interviews and about the researchers’ objectives. There was tension between the situational identity sets of guests/hosts and researchers/subjects. On the meta-communicative level, the family members also inquired about implicit norms concerning research procedures. The situated identities of researchers/subjects turned out to interact with more transportable participant identities (such as ethnic or national identities), when the Italian identity of the researchers made relevant the family members’ ‘Italianness’. The paper demonstrates that the professional identities of interviewers as researches are subject to negotiation and interact with other participant identities. The author argues that the study of situated identities needs to become central to the analysis of data generated in research contexts as such events are just as natural and dynamic as everyday conversation. Such analysis may provide interesting insights into participants’ emic definitions of identities. The volume presents the state-of-the-art research in the developing field of workplace discourse, with a focus on the processes of identity construction in professional and institutional environments, such as corporate management meetings, the courtroom or the school. The papers focus on a number of leadership identities, like that of a meeting chair, the identities of a teacher and a student, the appellate court judge, or the identity of a researcher. The analyses demonstrate that all the identities emerge as constructed and indexed in interaction, and in relation to other relevant identities in professional contexts. The papers represent a coherent theoretical approach and perspective, all of them viewing identity as both rooted in the existing professional knowledge and procedures, and as relational and dynamically negotiated in and through interaction with other institutional or lay participants in professional and institutional environments. That theoretical stance informs the methodological choices: the authors opt for multi-method approaches, carefully integrating methodologies as toolkits that best address their research goals and ensure successful analytical procedures. The division of papers into three sections is important as it helps distinguish the areas of workplace discourse that have already been investigated, as Part I on leadership identities in business context, from those that have not been well demarcated and researched (Part II), or those that invite us to revise our established perspectives on such identities as a student, a teacher or a researcher (Part III). As a whole, the volume presents a complex but coherent research perspective on identities in workplace environments that will inform and inspire future research.
98
Book review
References Bucholtz, Mary, Hall, Kira, 2005. Identity in interaction: a sociocultural identity approach. Discourse Stud. 7 (4--5), 538--614. Holmes, Janet, Stubbe, Maria, 2003. Power and Politeness in the Workplace. Longman, London. Małgorzata Suszczyn´ska is Senior Assistant Professor at the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Szeged, Hungary, where she teaches courses in sociopragmatics, conversational analysis and linguistic (im)politeness. Her research interests include linguistic (im) politeness and cross/intercultural pragmatics, and more recently, identity and face. She has done research on apology and remedial work in Hungarian, Polish and English, and on (im)politeness behind the Iron Curtain. Recent publication: Ogiermann, Eva, Suszczyn´ska, Małgorzata, 2011. (Im)Politeness Behind the Iron Curtain. In: Bargiela-Chiappini, F., D.Z. Kadar (Eds), Politeness Across Cultures. Palgrave, Basingstoke, pp. 194--216.
Małgorzata Suszczyn´ska Institute of English and American Studies, Department of English, University of Szeged, Szeged 6722, Hungary E-mail address: [email protected]
ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics 68 (2014) 94--98 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Book review Constructing Identities at Work Jo Angouri and Meredith Marra (Eds.), Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2012, 248 pp., ISBN: 978-0-23027237-8, $125.00 (hardback) Constructing Identities at Work presents a selection of most recent research on identity construction in various professional and institutional settings. The book includes a Foreword, Notes on Contributors, eleven chapters grouped in three thematic parts and an index. In the Foreword, Bargiela-Chappini observes that the interest in professional identities is recent, particularly from the discursive perspective, having increased since 1990s. The author comments on the elusive and ambiguous nature of identity, both as a word and a concept, and reflects on the most recent approaches, labels and understandings of identity and identification in social theory and discourse-based studies, including professional and business discourses. The author emphasizes that the present collection of papers is ‘‘the first volume, as far as I know, that concentrates on the construction of professional identities as they emerge through the performance of everyday work practices’’ (p. x), and ‘‘will become a point of reference for future research’’ (p. x). Chapter 1 (Meredith Marra and Jo Angouri, Investigating the Negotiation of Identity: A View from the Field of Workplace Discourse) presents an overview of the book. The authors mention shared themes, introduce key concepts in identity theories, recent developments in understanding identity construction at work and provide summaries of the chapters. They observe that the contributors successfully adopt a broadened view on professional identity and bring together different approaches and methodologies in order to provide various perspectives on identity construction and research. Finally, they conclude that ‘‘the collection does not aim to create an orthodoxy for the study of identity, but instead [aims] to pave the way for raising and problematizing issues of common concern and to encourage diversity of views’’ (p. 11). Part I on Leadership identity in Business Contexts consists of four chapters which focus on different aspects of the construction of leadership identity, mostly in the context of a meeting in a corporate workplace. Chapter 2 (Jan Svennevig, Leadership Style in Managers’ Feedback in Meetings) investigates professional identity of senior managers. The data come from a corpus of videorecorded management meetings in a large Scandinavian company. The study takes a Conversation Analytic approach and focuses on three instances of senior managers’ feedback responses to reports. The analysis describes the actions and practices of feedback responses, their internal structure and stylistic features, how they construct interpersonal relations, the leadership style and the professional identity of a leader. The feedback responses contain three main actions: diagnosing the situation, evaluating the subordinates, and giving directions for future action, all of them central to a professional identity and a leadership style. For instance, in the case of negative evaluations, the managers may mitigate them upgrading the positive aspects, or leave them unmitigated, using a confrontational and accusatory tone. In the analyzed extracts, the differences in leadership styles consist of: promoting team identity, in-group solidarity and personal relations in the first extract, foregrounding organizational identity, the manager’s superior knowledge, strong opinions and clear directions in the second, and promoting individuality and independence in the group in the third. These differences are also analyzed in terms of three dimensions: knowledge (the epistemic aspect involving authority), communicative rights and obligations (the social relations of solidarity or dominance), and emotion (displays of closeness and sympathy or unmitigated criticism and hostility). In Svennevig’s study, identity emerges as a relational concept and a leadership style consists of the different ways managers use to contribute to establishing relations in the meetings. The study is a contribution to empirical investigation of leadership as practice, and to leadership identity as jointly construed by participants in interaction. Chapter 3 (Stephanie Schnurr and Olga Zayts, Be(com)ing a Leader: A Case Study of Co-Constructing Professional Identities at Work) examines the identity of a newly promoted team-leader as negotiated and co-constructed in discourse. The authors take a social constructionist perspective and define leadership as a dynamic performance and a relational phenomenon, co-constructed between the leaders and the people they work with. The authors apply two principles of
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.05.006 0378-2166/
Book review
95
identity construction (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005), the relational principle and the indexicality principle (the indexed identity categories being ‘leader’ or ‘boss’). The data consist of video-recordings of six weekly meetings of an administrative team at a Hong Kong company, supplemented by interviews, participant observation, organizational documents, in line with a multi-method approach developed by the Language in the Workplace (LWP) project (Holmes and Stubbe, 2003). An in-depth case study of a newly promoted leader of a small administrative team, Cheryl, focuses on how leadership identities are conjointly created, negotiated and contested by the team members. While Cheryl was successfully constructing herself as the leader, opening and closing the meetings, being in charge of the agenda and staying involved in the decision-making processes, occasionally other members attempted to deconstruct her leader position. The authors conclude that constructing leader identities is not always a harmonious process and may involve complex antagonistic and challenging discourses. They argue that ‘‘it is particularly in these moments of interactional struggles and challenges that interactional identities are created and formed’’ (p. 57). The analysis demonstrates that professional identities are multiple and shift dynamically, always in relation to the identities of other interlocutors. Chapter 4 (Pamela Rogerson-Revell, Chairing International Business Meetings: Investigating Humour and Leadership Style in the Workplace) examines the role of the chair in international business meetings and investigates the use of humor as a discursive strategy constructing leadership identity. The study takes a social constructionist perspective on social identity, adopts interactional sociolinguistics as an analytical framework and a CA approach to context. The analysis reveals that humor is a sophisticated discursive tool to do both ‘power’ (for instance, managing face threats) and ‘solidarity’ (creating a team, developing relationships). The corpus consists of meeting recordings collected from two international organizations, one in Hong Kong (HK meetings) and the other one in Europe (EU meetings). The dominant function of humor used by the EU meeting chairs is relational (getting things done while maintaining solidarity and collegiality), while the HK meetings differ in chairing style and the use of humor. All the chairs use humor both relationally and transactionally, and there is also evidence of humor being used in a transformational way, to generate new ideas and solve problems. Also, the meeting chairs differ in the use of humor depending on what they consider to be appropriate interactive behavior in a particular context. The author concludes that ‘‘the ability to construct an appropriate leadership style, whether through the use of humor or other interactive strategies, to be able to accommodate the needs and expectations of a linguistically and socio-culturally diverse group, is a potentially powerful leadership skill and one which is of particular benefit to chairs of international workplace meetings’’ (p. 81). Chapter 5 (Jo Angouri and Meredith Marra, ‘OK one last thing for today then’: Constructing Identities in Corporate Meeting talk’) focuses on the ways meeting chairs construct their identity through floor management and the handling of meeting agendas as means of displaying roles and identities within a corporate meeting context. The authors take a social constructionist stance and employ the Communities of Practice (CofP) approach in order to illuminate the interplay between local (micro) practices and the wider (macro) corporate context. The audio/video-recorded data were collected in Europe and New Zealand, using the procedures of the Wellington Language in the Workplace (LWP) project (Holmes and Stubbe, 2003). Both the European and New Zealand data show senior or General Managers acting as chairs in formal and informal meetings or discussions. In the formal meetings the chair identity is overt, explicit, that of an outsider, their status seen in facilitating the meetings with pre-allocated turns (such as OK thanks everyone for coming). In informal meetings chairs, often not formally nominated, construct themselves as helpful and supportive leaders. The formal and informal meetings differ in floor management and in both the participants orient toward the mutual understanding of the role of the chair and of how corporate meetings work. The chair power is negotiated and discursively constructed (e.g. their decisions are acknowledged, their humor is positively responded to). As there are striking similarities in the ways chair identities are constructed in corporate meeting talk the authors suggest a genre perspective should be considered for future research. Part II, entitled Rhetoric, Expertise and Ideology in Identity Construction consists of two papers which share the common focus on rhetoric means used in identity construction. Chapter 6 (Veronika Koller, Hard-working, team-oriented individuals’: Constructing professional Identities incorporate Mission Statements) examines how the language and rhetoric of mission statements construct professional identities for employees. The chapter suggests a new area of research in that it applies the discourse-historical approach (elements of systemic-functional grammar and classical rhetoric) to corporate discourse. The genre of mission statement is viewed as a management tool, which promotes corporate culture and ethos, functions to motivate staff and their loyalty, and constructs professional identities as ideal selves which reflect values and goals of corporate decision-makers. Systemic functional grammar is the basis for a qualitative analysis of representations of social actors in the sample texts and how they are positioned vis-à-vis the company. The data consist of a large corpus of words of texts from the companies of the 2003 Fortune Global 5000, analyzed for the most common labels for employees as social actors (e.g. personnel, staff, human resources), and for frequencies, collocates and concordance with semantic domains. Selected samples of mission statements were further analyzed for
96
Book review
transitivity, attribution and modality. The findings demonstrate that some semantic domains, such as ‘emotions’ and ‘ethics’, were overrepresented in the mission statements, the function of which was to build an affective company-stakeholder relationship and present the company as credible. While the combination of systemic functional grammar and classical rhetoric can inspire further research, the author suggests that corpus and text analysis could be combined with ethnomethodological and conversation analytical approaches to investigate how the employees co-construct their own identities and resist professional identities constructed in corporate genres. Chapter 7 (Eva-Maria Graf, ‘‘Yes then I will tell you maybe a little bit about the procedure’’ -- Constructing Professional Identity where there is not yet a Profession: the Case of Executive Coaching) examines how two coaches and their clients establish and negotiate the coach identity within a context which lacks a clear framework of professional coaching knowledge and routines. The author applies an integrative method, combining Conversation Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, pragmatics and interactional sociolinguistics. The data come from the recordings of an executive coaching approach (‘‘Emotional Intelligence Coaching’’) carried out in Germany. The analysis revealed that the lack of shared understanding of the nature of coaching as a professional helping encounter leads the coaches to a more explicit negotiation of the activity with their clients. For instance, the coaches initiated explicit meta-discourse about how they understand coaching and their role and responsibilities. They distanced themselves from psychotherapy, attuning with the clients’ wishes, and projected themselves as knowledgeable, credible and loyal supporters of the clients, who act independently from the paying company. The topicalization of methodological, conceptual and procedural issues helped the coaches construct shared meanings upon the uptake from their clients. Although the scope of the analysis does not allow for generalizations, the author concludes that coaching interaction differs from more established professional practices in that the construction of professional and institutional world takes place frontstage. The author predicts that once executive coaching is established as a profession with institutional routines and shared practices, these concerns will lose their frontstage position. Part III, entitled Professional Identities in Institutional contexts consists of four papers, three of which focus on identity construction in various workplace environments and the last one address the issue of the professional identity of the researcher. Chapter 8 (Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Teachers, Students and Ways of Telling in Classroom Sites: A Case of Out-of(Work) Place Identities) explores the construction of teachers’ and students’ identities in the life of a London school as part of the study entitled Urban Classroom Culture and Interaction. The study reveals a high number of PNMC (popular and new media culture) engagements as part of peer-talk in class (having the mobile phone on, imitating TV series characters, meta-talk about music videos) which are not connected with the classroom instruction. The author uses a multi-method approach to data collection (ethnographic observations, radio-mic recordings, interviews, questionnaires, playback sessions, participants’ meta-commentaries) and develops a practice-based heuristics which connects ways of telling (students’ peer talk and PMNS engagements are routine ways of telling), sites or social spaces (the classroom), and the students as tellers. This evidence shows that PNMC engagements have symbolic capital for the participants and emerge as a field for the struggle over resources. The classroom is redefined as a polycentric or bi-centric space, and a teacher-led order occasionally clashes with a peer-order. The students occasionally display resistance to the teacher’s instructions or requests to abandon their PNMC engagements, and resist the teachers’ attempts to join in the peer-talk, perceived as ‘their’ (the students’) activity. Identity-wise, while the teacher--student identity set remains relevant, PNMC engagements make other situated identities emerge (a friend, a peer group member or a PNMC user). The reflexive interviews revealed that both students and teachers experienced the tension between the actual and the apprehended identities in class. The author suggests that the findings bring in a new dimension to the discussion concerning the integration of new technologies into the curriculum: the teachers may nurture such independent spaces as students’ PNMC engagements, leaving them as controlled and regulated by the students themselves. Chapter 9 (Karen Tracy, Identity-Work I Appellate Oral Argument: Ideological Identities within a Professional One) demonstrates how oral argument discourse enacts and reflects the professional identity of US state Supreme Court judges. The author defines appellate court as a highly specialized genre and describes its workings. Her central materials are video--audiotapes and transcripts of oral argument about same-sex marriage that occurred in eight states between 2005 and 2009. The analysis reveals that the identity of an appellate judge is enacted through three kinds of coordinated discourse moves: frame-constructing actions, lexical and speech act moves, and relational definers, constructing appellate judges as legal professionals engaged in doing oral argument. The appellate judges are systematically addressed as ‘‘your honor’’ or ‘‘chief justice’’, which constructs them as particularly high status professionals as compared to attorneys. They employ distinctive legal vocabulary (‘‘amicus brief’’), pervasively use argument meta-discourse terms (‘‘claim, evidence, argument’’) and neutrality markers in questions. They can ask questions whenever they choose, and initiate and manage
Book review
97
interruptions. Also, they frequently use hypothetical questions and unmitigated disagreement and do not use assessment moves. The analysis also revealed rarer moves that cued a particular ideological stance of appellate judges, when the judges engaged in evaluative discourse actions like story-telling questions that strongly supported the view of one party, used culturally loaded phrases that conveyed a strong sense of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and employed judge-initiated humor at the expense of one party. Tracy emphasizes the importance of studying identity-work in state supreme courts as sites of law-making. Also, the author suggests that gender performance in the appellate court as a non-gender attentive context may be an area of interest for future study. Chapter 10 (Keith Richards, Engaging Identities: Personal Disclosure and Professional Responsibility) explores how a new teacher seeks to establish his identity within the group of permanent staff members. The chapter draws on Conversation Analysis (CA) and the data come from a project studying staffroom talk in a small language school, where the author was a participant observer, took field notes, carried out interviews and made audio recordings and participated in meetings. The analysis focuses on an example of a contested identity, where a temporary teacher attempts to establish himself as an ‘experienced teacher’ referring to his previous experience and status. This creates a disjunction between his status as a temporary staff member in the language school and his ‘outside’ identity as an experienced senior professional. Also, his identity engagements distance him from the other staff members who collaboratively position him as an outsider (they use the exclusive ‘we’), who does not share the group’s common knowledge and does not recognize the non-hierarchical, collaborative workplace culture of the school. In sum, his identity construction efforts are not regarded as legitimate within that group. The author also explores the analytical implications of the outsider status of the new member, analyzing a deviant case, in which the new member’s unusual interactional behavior (the evidence of his suppressed identity as a fiancé) goes unnoticed by his colleagues, probably due to the unstable nature of his identity in the group. The analysis also suggests that identity may be at times the product of conscious design. In Chapter 11 (Anna de Fina, ‘‘We are not there. In fact we will go to the garden to take the rain’’: Researcher Identity and the Observer Paradox) the author argues that the constructionist approach to identity should be expanded to include the research context and interview- or researcher-generated data. As a research interview is an interactional event, it needs to be viewed as a source of data on social interaction, being both the ‘‘topic’’ and the ‘‘resource’’. The data for the analysis consist of videorecorded interviews with Italian Australian families in Melbourne, with special focus on how the family members orient to their situational identities as subjects of investigation (‘‘interviewees’’) and to their interlocutors’ identities as researchers (‘‘interviewers’’). The participant’s paradox (on par with the Observer paradox) often emerged in the absence of the researcher, when the family members displayed uncertainty and curiosity about their role in the interviews and about the researchers’ objectives. There was tension between the situational identity sets of guests/hosts and researchers/subjects. On the meta-communicative level, the family members also inquired about implicit norms concerning research procedures. The situated identities of researchers/subjects turned out to interact with more transportable participant identities (such as ethnic or national identities), when the Italian identity of the researchers made relevant the family members’ ‘Italianness’. The paper demonstrates that the professional identities of interviewers as researches are subject to negotiation and interact with other participant identities. The author argues that the study of situated identities needs to become central to the analysis of data generated in research contexts as such events are just as natural and dynamic as everyday conversation. Such analysis may provide interesting insights into participants’ emic definitions of identities. The volume presents the state-of-the-art research in the developing field of workplace discourse, with a focus on the processes of identity construction in professional and institutional environments, such as corporate management meetings, the courtroom or the school. The papers focus on a number of leadership identities, like that of a meeting chair, the identities of a teacher and a student, the appellate court judge, or the identity of a researcher. The analyses demonstrate that all the identities emerge as constructed and indexed in interaction, and in relation to other relevant identities in professional contexts. The papers represent a coherent theoretical approach and perspective, all of them viewing identity as both rooted in the existing professional knowledge and procedures, and as relational and dynamically negotiated in and through interaction with other institutional or lay participants in professional and institutional environments. That theoretical stance informs the methodological choices: the authors opt for multi-method approaches, carefully integrating methodologies as toolkits that best address their research goals and ensure successful analytical procedures. The division of papers into three sections is important as it helps distinguish the areas of workplace discourse that have already been investigated, as Part I on leadership identities in business context, from those that have not been well demarcated and researched (Part II), or those that invite us to revise our established perspectives on such identities as a student, a teacher or a researcher (Part III). As a whole, the volume presents a complex but coherent research perspective on identities in workplace environments that will inform and inspire future research.
98
Book review
References Bucholtz, Mary, Hall, Kira, 2005. Identity in interaction: a sociocultural identity approach. Discourse Stud. 7 (4--5), 538--614. Holmes, Janet, Stubbe, Maria, 2003. Power and Politeness in the Workplace. Longman, London. Małgorzata Suszczyn´ska is Senior Assistant Professor at the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Szeged, Hungary, where she teaches courses in sociopragmatics, conversational analysis and linguistic (im)politeness. Her research interests include linguistic (im) politeness and cross/intercultural pragmatics, and more recently, identity and face. She has done research on apology and remedial work in Hungarian, Polish and English, and on (im)politeness behind the Iron Curtain. Recent publication: Ogiermann, Eva, Suszczyn´ska, Małgorzata, 2011. (Im)Politeness Behind the Iron Curtain. In: Bargiela-Chiappini, F., D.Z. Kadar (Eds), Politeness Across Cultures. Palgrave, Basingstoke, pp. 194--216.
Małgorzata Suszczyn´ska Institute of English and American Studies, Department of English, University of Szeged, Szeged 6722, Hungary E-mail address: [email protected]