Clare Butler

Wanted – straight talkers: stammering and aesthetic labour:

The discussion of aesthetic labour has largely been confined to ‘looking good’. However, aesthetic labour also includes ‘sounding right’, where ‘excellent communication skills’ is an almost mandatory component of job advertisements. Much success in the labour market is therefore predicated on employees possessing the right verbal characteristics. In this article empirical research with men who stammer is used to extend our understanding of the issues which surround aesthetic labour. Findings demonstrate routine discrimination – by employers and the men themselves – with reference to a perceived speech–role fit. For the men, aesthetic labour is an embodied emotional labour: representing the effort between what is said and how it is said. Their sometime inability to sound right saw the men seek to enhance their knowledge or emphasize other communication attributes, such as listening. The article highlights the difficulties for anti-discrimination policy to offset the entrenched, socio-cultural nature of what constitutes employability.

Making interview transcripts real: the reader’s response

This research note considers how we interact with verbatim interview transcripts. Drawing on reader-response theory, the note examines the possible effect of readers’ engagement with this often dysfluent talk-as-text. Lessons from the reader-response literature suggest that in realizing verbal transcripts we may be convincingly representing changed worlds to our audiences – specifically, our world and not their world. As a result of this potential hazard, this note alerts qualitative researchers to be mindful of the possible impact of engaging with talk-as-text and offers strategies to retain robustness in their research.

How do we do public service? The socio-psychological status of public servants

What behaviours do public servants regard as representing publicness? Do those same behaviours allow us to meet the challenges of an increasingly diverse and testing civicness? The authors think not. They argue that the existing psychological contract needs to be examined and collectively redefined, initiating a reinvention in how we behave when we do public service.

The probability evaluation game: an instrument to highlight the skill of reflexive listening

ABSTRACT This paper describes the development of the Probability Evaluation Game (PEG): an innovative teaching instrument that emphasises the sophistication of listening and highlights listening as a key skill for accounting practitioners. Whilst in a roundtable format, playing PEG involves participants individually evaluating a series of probability terms and then calling out their evaluations amongst fellow players who have done the same. When listening to peers’ responses, any difference in evaluation of the same term confronts players with the knowledge that without skilled, reflexive listening conversations are dangerous playgrounds of miscommunication. The PEG presents a valuable learning opportunity where the potential impact of this issue for accounting and business world can be discussed. This paper details how PEG was developed, its format and how it has been used with students and accounting practitioners. Furthermore emergent, and often intriguing, learning points are discussed and related to accounting and the workplace more generally.

Pills, ills and the ugly face of aesthetic labour: ‘They should’ve discriminated against me’

This article presents a vivid account of one woman’s experience of taking on a second job – the role of a slimming club consultant – when her husband is made unemployed. Her story highlights how aesthetic labour, particularly when a worker’s appearance becomes more prominent over time, can lead to dangerous behaviours, namely the use of weight-loss pills and illegal drugs. These behaviours resulted in sleeplessness, frequent headaches and a feeling of disgust. Furthermore, this troubling account raises an important and uncomfortable question: can discrimination in the workplace sometimes be ‘for the best’?

‘Passionate and professional’: reconciling logics in public service accounting

In order to deliver public value, the UK government sought to build relationships and connect ‘the public’ with public servants (including back-office workers), but with what effect? Drawing on interviews with public service accountants, the authors found that how these accountants conceptualized ‘the public’—as society or people—shaped whether public value was considered as a monetary or moral concept. Accountants who regarded the public as people spoke of an improper level of involvement and struggled to maintain their professionalism.

Being Appropriately Professional: The Interaction between Professionalism, ICT and Knowledge Transfer

This article examines how professionalism impacts on the interaction and knowledge transfer of professionals within open plan workspaces and between distributed workplaces when using ICT. Knowledge is key to the system of professions and the power of professionals. At the same time, professional work requires professionals to behave in an appropriate and professional‐like manner, and this includes sharing knowledge with colleagues. Yet, the ideology of professionalism is changing. Alongside, professionals are working differently, including across distributed workplaces and often interacting via ICT. These shifting contexts make understanding the interaction between professionalism, knowledge transfer and ICT crucial. Drawing on Goffmans work, particularly his exposition of interaction rituals, interviews with accountants reveal that when using ICT, the professional framework of interaction – what can be said, who has the right to speak and who is the audience – meets appropriateness in sometimes contradictory ways, potentially limiting the growth and propagation of knowledge.

Alone in the back-office: the isolation of those who care to support public services

Prior research suggests that it is through providing direct support to citizens that public servants gain a source of meaning in their work; and affirm their public service identities. This article explores how employees who work in a public service support function and receive little, if any, direct feedback from citizens may maintain their public service identity during their back office work. The study finds, against much previous empirical research, that these back office employees achieve positive identity affirmation through bureaucratic work. The findings also show that they affirm their caring and community focused public service identity by noting their superiority in this regard when compared with colleagues. However, this augmented self-narrative results in many experiencing feelings of isolation. The article discusses how these findings extend the understanding of identity affirmation among back office public servants and may improve our ability to effectively support these workers.

Exploring identity: a figurative character image-elicitation approach

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of incorporating visual methods in the study of identity and identity work. Design/methodology/approach – Scholars have proposed a range of approaches to the study of identity. However, studies have typically relied on interviews or surveys with little exploration of the dynamic narrating of self-in-situ inherent to identity and identity work. The paper reviews the aforementioned methods, builds on the power of visual approaches, and proposes a method involving figurative character image-elicitation (FCI). FCI uses personal, contextual cartoon-style images to mobilize and encourage the narration of identity. The paper details the development of the approach, drawing on a pilot study, and reports its use in an exploratory study of employee identity. Findings – The results suggest that the use of FCI provides a situated focus for the narration of identity with the signifying – self-insitu – nature of the images providing room for participants t...