Zuocheng Zhang

Negotiating Membership in Employment Interviews at a Chinese Media Institution

This article builds on Sacks’ Membership Inference-rich Representative (MIR) device in exploring how interviewers and interviewees negotiate professional membership. The data for the research include the transcripts of authentic interviews between 6 interviewers working for a Chinese English-medium media institution and 11 interviewees, the interviewers’ notes, and the recruitment results (9 successful ones and 2 unsuccessful ones). The analysis indicates that the Chinese media institution as a community of practice has its membership categories and inference-rich information relevant to the categories. The MIR device was used by the interviewers and the interviewees in their interactions with the successful interviewees orientating to or negotiating the target membership category of Chinese journalists by brokering boundary objects such as the inference-rich information relevant to the target membership category. The notion of membership contextualization cues is proposed by drawing on Gumperz’s contextualization cues and Sacks’ membership categorization device and applied in the interpretation of the findings.

Discursive Construction of Professional Identity

This chapter takes the Business English students’ writing in business genres as a site for enacting their emerging professional identity and focuses on how they deployed business genre knowledge in their writing to index their professional identity. By drawing on a discourse analysis of their writing and interviews with them, the chapter demonstrates that the students’ deployment of business genre knowledge was not random but based on their perceived professional norms, practices, and expertise. Their business genre knowledge was therefore the source of indexing devices or indexicals for their professional identity. The chapter illustrates their use of indexicals on the formal, process, rhetorical, and subject-matter dimensions of business genre knowledge in their discursive construction of professional identity.

Conceptualising Professional Identity

This chapter presents the conceptualisation of professional identity. By drawing on research in communities of practice, professional socialisation, discourse, identity, indexicality, and business genre knowledge, professional identity is viewed as emergent in participatory learning in communities of practice. It is also seen as involving the dual process of acquiring semiotic resources and experiences for performing a social role as well as undergoing changes in the perception of self in relation to the social role. It is described with reference to four constituting factors, which are professional goal, values and perspective on international business professionals, technical competence, and discursive competence. It is co-constructed in discursive practices with genre knowledge as the indexing resource. These understandings are incorporated into a working definition of professional identity to guide the study this book reports on.

Reception of Students’ Professional Identity Construction

This chapter presents how the five Business English students’ discursive construction of professional identity was received or in a sense validated by eight international business practitioners. On the whole, these professionals viewed the students’ deployment of genre knowledge in their writing in the business genres in positive light and also related the students’ genre performance to their professional identity. Based on their comments, this chapter reveals the expertise (evidence in the positive comments) and gaps (the negative comments) of the five focal students in their discursive construction of professional identity. The international business professionals’ comments also inform the generation of a scheme for giving feedback on students’ writing in business genres.

Mode, Access, and Agency in Participatory Learning

This chapter demonstrates that the Business English students participated in three salient and interlocking communities of practice—the mediating community of practice (the Business English programme), the transitory community of practice (student groups and associations), and the target community of practice (the companies or institutions in which they interned). The mediating community of practice provided a proto-typical professional identity, which was rehearsed in the transitory community of practice and validated in the target community of practice. The students’ participatory learning shaped their emerging professional identity and, conversely, the coordination of access and agency complicated their participatory learning and professional identity construction.

Emerging Professional Identity

This chapter concerns what professional identity emerged for the Business English students. By conducting a qualitative examination of five focal students’ experiences of learning Business English at university, the chapter indicates that professional goal, values and perspective on international business professionals, technical competence, and discursive competence were underlying the students’ understanding of international business professionals as well as their evaluation of themselves and were therefore constituting factors for their professional identity. Each of them also developed a unique configuration of these four factors manifesting their emerging professional identity in distinct ways, which illustrates the dual process of identification and negotiability in their professional identity development. Professional identity was thus shown to have rich psychological reality for the Business English students.