That’s it, I’m calling it a dissertation. No more bending over backwards, no more worrying about arguments, no more fewer moodswings, no more late night revision rounds, no more excuses. Time to look up some old friends. Have a beer. Check out some new music. Relax. Sleep. Night everyone.
I have written about this before, but Michael Silverstein’s concept of indexical order is so good it makes me smile. Indexical order refers to the normativity of meaning relations: it is the ‘principle’ that bestows discourse with a particular meaning in a particular context.
Registers are a case in point. For instance, Jane Hill (2005: 114) has illustrated that mock Spanish has at least two indexicalities: a first-order indexicality that is usually associated with qualities of speakers of Spanish. However, when used by English speakers, words like ‘mañana’ can take on a pejorative second-order indexicality of laziness and ‘taking it easy’.
This sort of stereotyping also works in posh English, as illustrated by British comedian Michael McIntyre.
Hill, Jane (2005). Intertextuality as source and evidence for indirect indexical meanings. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15: 113–24.
Silverstein, Michael (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23 (3-4): 193-229.
Four, yes four, plenary presentations were scheduled on the Friday afternoon. Two corpus linguistic studies kicked off the written corporate communication theme. Birgitta Meex & Heidi Verplaetse (Lessius/KULeuven) compared German and English corporate mission statements. Berna Hendriks & Margot Van Mulken (University of Nijmegen) then presented an analysis of CEO communication.
The final two presentations were on…journalism. Ha! Martina Temmerman & Els Belsack (Erasmus University College Brussels) talked about positioning and self-representation during televised political interviews. Finally, Ellen Van Praet (Ghent University) and yours truly went the reflective/methodological route. We opted not to present micro data and instead focus on the pros and cons of secondary analysis.
Thank you: Geert, Katja, Craig, Chris, Sylvain, Priscilla and all the delegates for coming out. Hope to see you again at a DiO event.
Celia Roberts kicked off the first DiO session with a keynote on how ethnic diversity gets squeezed into institutions, in particular during job interviews. What exactly goes on in these interviews? Why do ethnic minority groups have persistently lower success rates during job interviews?
Many companies nowadays use “competency frameworks” during interviews. For instance, one of the five competencies that were used during the selection of junior management positions in a large British corporation was the notion of ‘taking ownership’. This a somewhat vague concept referring to ‘skills’ like
The rationale of competency frameworks is that it looks structured and fairer (“equal opportunities”) than questions such as “why do you want to work here”. Paradoxically, these frameworks produce disadvantages for candidates because they assume mastership of a register that is foreign to many applicants.
Job interviews blend three discourses: analytic talk, work-based talk and personal talk. These discourses are embedded and evaluated in a bureaucratic routine (it has to fit a certain ‘box’). In addition, there is a particular penalty associated with the interview that is inherently linguistic (cf. Bourdieu’s notion of ‘linguistic capital’). ‘Taking ownership’ is one such example of an abstract formulation that has been judged a suitable competence.
Crucially, some ethnic groups do not have access to these forms of linguistic capital and hence are almost systematically unsuccessful at job interviews. Celia looked primarily at low-paid jobs using an interactional sociolinguistic approach and video recordings of 76 interviews.
Celia’s data really drove home how successful candidates blend discourse modes (“customer-focused, deadline driven, “) and manage specific narrative structures (eg. the STAR structure – Situation, Task, Action, Result). Celia also looked at management interviews, in particular how some narratives are judged “acceptable” and others are not. Interestingly, successful candidates blended direct quotations with subtle, vivid and economic descriptions that display (analytic) agency and “responsible”, “professional” identities. Unsuccessful candidates used verbatim quotations and did not use self-evaluative descriptions.
So, if job interviews are indirectly discriminatory, one solution is to get rid of job interviews and substitute it with trials and more active mentoring for aspiring managers. Alternatively, educational materials in which the implied conversational rules are explained could be produced (e.g. DVDs).
“Job interview”, Flickr.com (Susanne13)
Dear colleague,
You are kindly invited to attend the opening of the 2nd three-day International Workshop on Discourse in Organizations (DiO) on Wednesday 16 September 2009 at the Zebrastraat convention centre, purple room (Zebrastraat 32, Ghent).
19.30 Lecture by Professor Celia Roberts (King’s College London):
‘Taking ownership’: language and ethnicity in the job interview
21.00 Reception
PS: Celia is in a class of her own, kinda like Dinah. Aloxe recommended.
to a very large canvas and to hundreds or even thousands of colors. But the canvas and the colors come from the past. They are hand-me-downs. As we learn to use them, we find out that those around us have strong ideas about what can be drawn, in which proportions, in what combinations, and for what purposes. As any artist knows, there is an ethics of drawing and coloring as well as a market that will react sometimes capriciously, but many times quite predictably to any individual attempts to place a mark in the history or representation or simply readjust the proportions of certain spaces at the margins … Just like art-works, our linguistic products are constantly evaluated, recycled or discarded.
Alessandro Duranti (1997) Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 334.
“used crayons” by chromatofobe @ Flickr.com
Takeaways from the 11th Int’l Pragmatics Conference in Melbourne:
From L-R: A still jetlagged yours truly, Daniel 'I flew business and slept 8 hours' Perrin, Lut Baten and Val Williams @ the IPrA conference opening reception
Collaborative news writing: A discursive perspective on news production
Convenors: Daniel Perrin, Ellen Van Praet & Tom Van Hout
Panel line-up
I am still jetlagged and so I read everything from movie reviews to working papers on language diversity:
I would suggest that a sound sociolinguistics of globalization should not just look at the world and its languages, but also to the world and its registers, genres, repertoires and styles, if it wants to have any empirical grounding. It is in small-scale, niched phenomena such as the ones considered here [i.e. the language ideologies of American accent websites, TVH] that we see real language: language that is invested by real-world interests and language that matters to real people.
Jan Blommaert (WPLD 8, p17). And no, this quote does not induce sleep. But let’s try anyway – otherwise I won’t get to see anything of Melbourne during daylight.
Tom Van Hout 