Table Of ContentConstructing Identities at Work
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Constructing Identities
at Work
Edited by
Jo Angouri
University of the West of England, Bristol, UK
and
Meredith Marra
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Foreword by
Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini
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Selection and editorial matter © Jo Angouri and Meredith Marra 2011
Chapters © their individual authors 2011
Foreword © Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini 2011
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2011 by
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Table of Contents
List of Tables and Figures vii
Foreword by Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini viii
Notes on Contributors xii
1 Investigating the Negotiation of Identity: A View
from the Field of Workplace Discourse 1
Meredith Marra and Jo Angouri
Part I Leadership Identity in Business Contexts
2 Leadership Style in Managers’ Feedback in Meetings 17
Jan Svennevig
3 Be(com)ing a leader: A Case Study of Co-Constructing
Professional Identities at Work 40
Stephanie Schnurr and Olga Zayts
4 Chairing International Business Meetings: Investigating
Humour and Leadership Style in the Workplace 61
Pamela Rogerson-Revell
5 ‘OK one last thing for today then’: Constructing
Identities in Corporate Meeting Talk 85
Jo Angouri and Meredith Marra
Part II Rhetoric, Expertise and Ideology in
Identity Construction
6 ‘Hard-working, team-oriented individuals’: Constructing
Professional Identities in Corporate Mission Statements 103
Veronika Koller
7 “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 127
Eva-Maria Graf
Part III Professional Identities in Institutional Contexts
8 Teachers, Students and Ways of Telling in Classroom
Sites: A Case of Out-of-(Work) Place Identities 151
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
v
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vi Table of Contents
9 Identity-Work in Appellate Oral Argument:
Ideological Identities within a Professional One 175
Karen Tracy
10 Engaging Identities: Personal Disclosure and Professional
Responsibility 200
Keith Richards
11 “We are not there. In fact now we will go to the garden
to take the rain”: Researcher Identity and the Observer’s
Paradox 223
Anna De Fina
Index 246
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List of Tables and Figures
Tables
4.1 Composition of three EU meetings 68
4.2 Composition of the four HK meetings 68
6.1 Semantic macro-domain ‘emotion’ 114
6.2 Semantic macro-domain ‘social actions, states
and processes’ 115
6.3 Semantic macro-domain ‘psychological actions,
states and processes’ 115
6.4 Miscellaneous overused semantic domains 116
7.1 Communicative goal – strategic realization – linguistic
manifestation 134
7.2 Summary of coaches’ strategies to construct their
professional identities 144
7.3 Strategies to construct professional identity and token
realizations 145
Figures
6.1 Dimensions of identity 104
6.2 Overlaps between logos, ethos and pathos 112
6.3 Partial concordance employees 117
vii
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Foreword
Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini
To try to say something new, or at least mildly intellectually stimulating
about identity – especially for a foreword to the first collection on iden-
tities in the workplace – is a daunting task. As an educated reader on
identity, rather than a specialist in the field, my first reaction to the edi-
tors’ invitation was one of hesitant submission to a vote of confidence
which gradually morphed into a personal challenge. After all, I have
analysed and reflected on business discourse for a number of years; a
few interactional incidents and insights from this volume resonate with
research with which I am quite familiar, even though their focus here is
specifically on identity, or rather, on identities. As the limited bibliogra-
phy extractable from the original contributions to this volume testifies,
interest in professional identities is recent but discursive approaches to
the analysis of professional identities have increased in number and
popularity since the 1990s. This is hardly surprising if we consider that
until only a few decades ago ‘identity’ was associated with philosophical
meditation rather than sociological analysis (Bauman, 2000). Moreover,
in the early days, it would have probably been discussed in the singular,
rather than the plural.
The pluralisation of identity appears to be a recent characterisa-
tion of a phenomenon that in sociology and social theory is seen as a
manifestation of the ambivalence that permeates postmodernity, or in
Bauman’s vocabulary, ‘liquid modernity’. The demise of certainties upon
which the sense of belonging was rooted in the past, and of the institu-
tions on which society was based and which sustained ‘togetherness’,
has translated into identities as ‘incarnation of ambivalence’ (Bauman,
2000, p. 32). The ambivalence of the word ‘identities’ is not exclusively
existential. Attempts to define the (use of) the word, as some of the
contributions to this volume have indeed done, reveal an intriguing
ambiguity, itself befitting of both the conceptual and ideological malle-
ability of an ‘identity approach’ to the study of human interaction.
As a linguist, I am attracted by etymology and the insight it provides
when one is faced with the inherent elusiveness of language. The Oxford
English Dictionary opens up a window for reflection on the significance
and implications of terms such as identity and identification, which in
recent decades have become increasingly laden with ideological and
viii
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Foreword ix
political overtones. I must admit that the definitions on offer befuddle
me. ‘Identity’ according to the OED (consulted on 13 January 2011) is
the ‘quality or condition of being the same’, … in the sense of ‘indi-
viduality, personality’; ‘a condition or fact that a person or thing is
itself and not something else’. Further: identity is also defined as: ‘The
sameness of a person or thing at all times or in all circumstances; the
condition of being a single individual; the fact that a person or thing is
itself and not something else; individuality, personality’. The sense of
fixedness is forbidding. A look at ‘identification’ – a term used in some
academic literatures in preference to ‘identity’ to convey the notion of
process – yields no more reassuring insight: ‘action of making a thing
identical with another, action of assimilating one thing to another’,
‘state of being or feeling oneself to be closely associated with someone
else’. The understanding of identification proposed here does not refer
to the creation or emergence of unique individualities through inter-
action but, rather, describes a process of merging individualities into
conformity.
A movement towards ‘oneness’ rather than ‘differentiation’ appears
to be implied by the definitions just cited, a tendency that probably cuts
across many of the labels and juxtapositions that populate the identity
domain such as, for example, social identity vs. personal identity (Sen,
2009), identity theory and social identity theory (Desrochers, Andreassi
and Thompson, 2004). If we accept for the sake of argument that
identity is about sameness rather than difference, then, perhaps, one
can begin to understand its popularity in the uncertainty-dominated
climate of postmodernity. The paradox of a consumer society almost
obsessed with ‘individualisation’, yet raising the flag of ‘identity’ high
over the unconscious struggles towards sameness, seems to me to pose
a challenge not only to philosophers and thinkers but also to all of us
who have been seduced by identity. Identity may be no more than ‘a
bundle of problems’ (Bauman, 2000, p. 12), or a ‘fog’ that is hard to
penetrate (Sen, 2009) but at least it is something to hang onto, a focus
for our existential angst and for our analytical quest for new ways of
talking about human interaction.
One other consideration to be made at this point concerns the ideo-
logical import of the identity movement. Like any other powerful dis-
course, identity is not immune from vested interests. To what extent is
identity a Western response to social instability and increasing inequali-
ties? What, if any, are the relations between identity and more imme-
diately psychological constructs such as ‘self’ and ‘difference’? What
is the role of social contexts and personal histories in the f ormation,
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