Jonathan Clifton

Master Narratives, Identities, and the Stories of Former Slaves

This book is intended for researchers in the field of narrative from post-graduate level onwards. It analyzes the audio-recordings of the narratives of former slaves from the American South which are now publically available on the Library of Congress website: Voices from the days of slavery . More specifically, this book analyses the identity work of these former slaves and considers how these identities are related to master narratives. The novelty of this book is that through using such a temporally diverse and relatively large corpus, we show how master narratives change according to both the zeitgeist of the here-and-now of the interview world and the historical period that is related in the there-and-then of the story world. Moreover, focusing on the active achievement of master narratives as socially-situated co-constructed discursive accomplishments we analyze how different, inherently unstable and even contradictory versions of master narratives are enacted.

The interactional negotiation of group membership and ethnicity: The case of an interview with a former slave:

We examine the way group membership and its relation with ethnicity is interactionally constructed in an interview between an interviewer who presents himself as favorable towards black music and black people and an interviewee who is a former slave. The interview, which took place in the 1940s Deep South in a context in which racial inequality was still institutionally embedded, focused both on the interviewee’s memories of slave life and on current life and opinions about music. The discussion of each period is characterized by a different genre: while extended turns and lengthy stories occur while discussing the antebellum period, the discussion of the postbellum period is characterized by short and heavily negotiated question and answer sequences. However, throughout the entire interview, the interviewee maintains coherence by frequently shifting alignments and basing group memberships on quite diverse criteria, as such challenging its relation with ethnicity as initiated by the interviewer.

Enacting Power Asymmetries in Reported Exchanges in the Narratives of Former Slaves

Direct reported speech has been described as serving many functions in stories, such as increasing vividness, creating authenticity, and enhancing audience involvement. Drawing on Bambergs model of positioning and focusing on reported exchanges, we argue that through its “constructed sequentiality” and its use of discourse strategies, direct reported speech also enacts power relations as they are constructed between the story characters in the referential world. This, of course, has implications for the function of these reported exchanges in the interview world and the construction of the interviewees moral position in relation to the local and global context. In particular, we focus on reported exchanges in narratives about slavery. First, we discuss fragments in which hegemonic power asymmetries between protagonists in stories are talked into being. Second, we focus on a lengthy story in which a slave is constructed as the powerful interlocutor whose discursive rights surpass those typical of his social category. As such, the nonessentialist nature of this discursive construction of power within the referential world is foregrounded, and it is also demonstrated that reported exchanges can have many diverse functions within the interview setting.

Investigating the Dark Side of Stories of “Good” Leadership: A Discursive Approach to Leadership Gurus’ Storytelling

Since the quest for locating an agreed upon prediscursive phenomenon behind the word “leadership” has proved fruitless, some researchers have suggested that leadership is an empty signifier to which many meanings can be attached. Taking this ontological shift seriously, rather than trying to locate leadership as a “thing” that is out there somewhere, it is perhaps better to investigate how meanings of leadership are constructed as in situ social practice. Adopting a discursive approach to leadership and using transcripts of a celebrity interview with management gurus Jack and Suzy Welch, this article analyses the stories they tell in which they provide normative accounts of what good leadership should be. Rather than taking these stories at face value, this article investigates both the way in which these stories are told as in situ social practice and the Discourses of leadership that are used as resources for storytelling and which are (re)produced in the storytelling. Findings indicate that while Jack and Suzy Welch do morally accountable identity work that presents leadership as heroic and positive, these stories also hide a darker side of leadership that is revealed in the analyses of wider societal Discourses that are invoked. The article closes with a call for a more critical approach to stories of leadership.

The Interactional Negotiation of the Rules of the Employment Interview Game Negative Remarks About Third Parties and “Doing” Trust

Job interviews have been the object of extensive academic research and of advice literature. Yet both have largely neglected to incorporate findings drawn from naturally occurring job interviews. In this article, we focus on the case of giving negative remarks about third parties. Popular how-to books strongly advise against such comments; however, while analyzing our corpus of more than 20 naturally occurring Belgian employment interviews, the frequent use of negative remarks about third parties was striking. This discrepancy between actual practice and prescriptive literature inspired us to investigate this phenomenon by focusing on the interactional dynamics of one job interview in which a candidate comments negatively on his boss after having constructed a personalized identity of a trustworthy person. We argue that, in this particular case, this negative comment demonstrates the candidate’s adaptability to the discursively renegotiated “rules” of the “interview game” and that this can be a successful strategy in employment interviews. To conclude, in the light of these findings, we speculate on the utility of the advice that “how-to books” provide.