Stephanie Schnurr

Politeness, Humor and Gender in the Workplace: Negotiating Norms and Identifying Contestation

Abstract After first considering some of the challenges of defining and measuring the concept of politeness, the analysis draws on data from the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project to illustrate the value of complementary quantitative and qualitative approaches to the issue of what it means to be polite at work. Using the concept of relational practice, an analysis of workplace humor serves to illustrate what each approach offers in terms of distinguishing different communities of practice, as well as providing a means of exploring the issue of politeness as a gendered concept. Instances of how two women leaders use humor in their very different communities of practice exemplify the diversity of ways of responding to gendered interactional workplace norms.

Exploring another side of co-leadership: Negotiating professional identities through face-work in disagreements

Traditional perceptions that view leadership as a top down process are increasingly challenged by so-called critical perspectives that acknowledge that leadership may involve several people. This article explores a particular type of these other leadership constellations, namely co-leadership where members share several leadership responsibilities. Drawing on more than twenty hours of authentic discourse data recorded in two workplaces in Hong Kong, we employ the analytical concepts of face and identity to identify and describe some of the complex processes through which co-leadership is enacted. Our particular focus is situations in which members of the co-leadership team disagree with each other. Our findings indicate that co-leadership is a dynamic process in which both members position themselves and each other as leader and co-leader at different moments throughout an interaction. This dynamic nature can be captured particularly well by exploring how face-work and identity construction are accomplished in interlocutors’ everyday workplace talk.

Impoliteness and ethnicity: Māori and Pākehā discourse in New Zealand workplaces

Abstract In New Zealand, as in many other post-colonial societies, biculturalism is a one-way street: Māori New Zealanders are more likely to be bicultural than are Pākehā New Zealanders. Consequently it is Māori norms, including discourse norms, which are more likely to be ignored in most New Zealand workplaces, with the potential for misunderstanding, and even for offence and unintended insult. Our research in Māori and Pākehā workplaces suggests that unintended impoliteness can subtly infiltrate the core activities of workplaces, namely workplace meetings. We illustrate this by examining differences in the ways in which Māori and Pākehā New Zealanders open and close meetings, and the ways in which Māori and Pākehā make critical comments about the behaviour of workplace employees, relating these discourse moves to considerations of politeness and impoliteness. Our data suggests that while Māori meeting openings tend to be direct, explicit, and elaborated, Pākehā meeting openings are brief and minimal. On the other hand, Māori critical comments in the workplace tend to be indirect, implicit and generalized, while at least in some Pākehā workplaces, criticism can be direct, contestive, and confrontational. The paper concludes by emphasizing that the tendencies identified are based on exploratory research, and that further research is needed to confirm or contest our tentative generalizations.

Effective Leadership in New Zealand Workplaces: Balancing Gender and Role

‘Workplace leadership’ is a gendered concept. As a public rather than a private domain, the workplace is typically male-dominated (e.g. Kendall and Tannen, 1997; McConnell-Ginet, 2000), and in most societies, men occupy the most powerful positions in companies and organisations (e.g. Hearn and Parkin, 1988; Sinclair, 1998). Until very recently, the prevailing stereotype of a leader, chief executive officer, and even senior manager has been decidedly male (e.g. Marshall, 1995), and the female voice in these public contexts has often been silenced.

Be(com)ing a leader: a case study of co-constructing professional identities at work

In this chapter we examine how leader identities are negotiated and co-constructed discursively from a social constructionist perspective. Our particular focus is the processes involved in (co-)constructing the identity of a team leader who has been newly promoted to this position from being an ordinary team member. More specifically, we explore how becoming and being a leader is accomplished interactionally and how various interlocutors participate in the diverse processes involved in this identity construction.

Exploring distributed leadership : solving disagreements and negotiating consensus in a 'leaderless' team

This article explores how leadership is done in a ‘leaderless’ team. Drawing on a corpus of more than 120 hours of audio-recorded meetings of different interdisciplinary research groups and using a discourse analytic framework and tools, we examine how leadership is enacted in a team that does not have an assigned leader or chair. Our specific focus is the discursive processes through which team members conjointly solve disagreements and negotiate consensus – which are two activities associated with leadership. More specifically, we analyse how meaning is collaboratively constructed and how team members arrive at a solution in those instances where there is some kind of disagreement, or even conflict, among team members. This discourse analytic study thus contributes to leadership research in two ways: i) by exploring some of the discursive processes through which leadership is actually performed in a ‘leaderless team’; and ii) by looking at a largely under-researched leadership constellation, namely distributed leadership. We thereby illustrate some of the benefits that discourse analytical approaches offer to an understanding of the specific processes that are involved in the complexities of leadership performance.

LEGITIMIZING CLAIMS FOR ‘CRISIS’ LEADERSHIP IN GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

This paper explores the discursive processes of legitimizing leadership claims in the context of the nuclear proliferation crisis. Three complementary analyses of texts are carried out: discourse analyses of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions and relevant speeches by members of the US administration, as well as a corpus analysis of news media accounts of nuclear proliferation published in prominent US and UK broadsheets. Findings suggest that leadership claims are legitimized through a range of discursive strategies, which are echoed across the different text types. However, a combination and comparison of the different datasets puts these findings into perspective and reveals that the various contexts and text types in which these leadership claims are made differ remarkably in terms of their use of relevant terms relating to leadership and crisis. We argue that this dynamic is best captured by the notion of an (inter)discursive chain of legitimization.

“[She] said: ‘take the test’ and I took the test”. Relational work as a framework to approach directiveness in prenatal screening of Chinese clients in Hong Kong

Abstract In this paper we apply the framework of relational work, or the work individuals invest in maintaining their relationships (Locher and Watts 2005), to the analysis of prenatal screening (PS) for Down Syndrome of Chinese clients in Hong Kong. PS has traditionally followed a nondirective principle that calls for an unbiased presentation of information and women’s autonomous decision- making regarding testing. However, in Chinese contexts, healthcare providers appear extremely directive; and women, in turn, explicitly express their expectations of being led in decision-making (Zayts et al. 2013). These observations lend support to previous politeness studies of Chinese institutional contexts wherein hierarchical communication has been described as “listening-centered, asymmetrical and differential” (Gao and Ting-Toomey 1998: 48). More recent politeness studies, however, warn against such stereotyping at a cultural level (Eelen 2001; Mills 2003, 2004; Watts 2003). In this paper, rather than using culture as an a priori explanatory variable to account for the directive stance of the healthcare providers, we argue that using the framework of relational work enables researchers to focus on how meaning is created and negotiated at the micro-level of an interaction, and to move away from “grand generalizations” about culture specific behaviors and expectations.

Manufacturing dissent: The discursive formation of nuclear proliferation (2006–2012)

This article draws on the conceptualisation of ‘discursive formation’ to examine the particular configuration of the ‘objects, subjects, concepts and strategies’ which constituted ‘nuclear proliferation’ between 2006 and 2012. While previous studies have mostly explored the discourse of nuclear proliferation through the analysis of newspaper texts, few have considered corpora from different sites or considered the changes, transformations and contradictions that take place when meanings are delocated from one site and relocated in another. Elements of poststructuralist discourse theory, critical linguistics and corpus linguistics are brought together to consider how events were constructed within two corpora: UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions and newspaper articles published in prominent UK and US broadsheets. WordSmith Tools (Version 5) was used to analyse word frequencies, statistical patterns of keywords, word collocation profiles and concordance patterns. Results indicate that the most salient lexical items refer to actors, strategic actions and technologies. As these constituents of nuclear proliferation are delocated from the political sphere and relocated in the public sphere, three discursive strategies unfold: personalisation, normalisation or exceptionalisation, and reification.

Leadership and culture : when stereotypes meet actual workplace practice

This chapter explores the complex relationship between leadership and culture with a particular emphasis on critically discussing some of the cultural stereotypes that exist about leadership in the context of Hong Kong . Drawing on audio- and video-recorded data collected at two workplaces in Hong Kong, this paper challenges some of the predominant stereotypes about leadership in Hong Kong and contrasts them with insights gained through a fine-grained in-depth analysis of leadership discourse that occurred in actual workplace encounters. Findings illustrate that while there is evidence in our data to support some of the cultural stereotypes about leadership in Hong Kong (e.g. that Chinese leaders tend to be autocratic and often assume a ‘father’ role while subordinates are submissive and expect to be told what to do), the everyday practices of leadership of actual people interacting with each other in actual workplaces doing actual things are much more complex and often more contradictory than these stereotypical claims and grand statements suggest. In actual practice, leadership is a highly complex and multifaceted concept and people draw on a wide range of different leadership styles to meet the situational demands.