Theorists Flashcards
John Swales (2011): Discourse Communities
Once you start work, you become a member of a professional community, which has a set of professional practices and shares specialist knowledge and certain values. Language plays a key role here, as people working together in the same organization or field have mechanisms of intercommunication and use professional genres and specialist lexis.
Linguists refer to such professional groups as discourse communities in
order to emphasize the important role language plays in their constitution.
Janet Holmes (2006): Relational Practice chapter (after Fletcher 1999)
Workplaces constitute one of the more interesting sites where individuals ‘do gender’, while at the same time constructing their professional identities and meeting their organisation’s expectations.
Drawing on interactional data recorded in New Zealand professional organisations, this paper focuses in particular on how participants manage and interpret the notion of ‘femininity’ in workplace discourse.
In much current usage, the concepts ‘feminine’ and ‘femininity’ typically evoke negative reactions.
The analysis suggests these notions can be reclaimed and reinterpreted positively using an approach which frames doing femininity at work as normal, unmarked, and effective workplace behaviour in many contexts. The analysis also demonstrates that multiple femininities extend beyond normative expectations, such as enacting relational practice (Fletcher 1999), to embrace more contestive and parodic instantiations of femininity in workplace talk.
Hornyak (1994)
Hornyak - 1994? - The shift from work talk to personal talk is always initiated by the highest-ranking person in
the room.
Herbert & Straight – 1989
Compliments tend to flow from those of higher rank to those of lower rank.
Study of Workplace Talk – Drew and Heritage, 1992
Summarised differences between everyday conversation and workplace talk: goal orientation, turn taking, allowable contributions, professional lexis, structure, asymmetry
Drew & Heritage 1992
Summarised differences between everyday conversation and workplace talk: goal orientation, turn taking, allowable contributions, professional lexis, structure, asymmetry
Various - 1998–2003 -
The way co-workers use small talk is defined by the power relationship between them. Superiors tend to initiate and delimit small talk, as well as defining what subject matters are acceptable subjects for
VARIOUS - 1998–2004
When giving a directive to an equal, workers tend to use more indirect devices (such as we
instead of you, hedged structures and modals). When giving directions to a subordinate, workers are often
more direct.
Wenger - Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.
