Description
This thesis examines the extent to which professional identities become relevant in the institutional talk-in-interaction between an employer and employees during a team meeting of a service providing business. The relevance of such identities depends on how they become embedded and thus demonstrable in interactional conduct. In particular, the co-existence of two modes of identity (authentic leader and efficiency oriented manager) relevant to the overarching role 'employer,' is of interest. This is explored through the close examination of actual institutional talk using conversation analysis. Particular attention is given to the interplay between the linguistic and lexical realizations of utterances with the actions they carry out in terms of identity construction. Two overarching communication events relevant to the employer's identity construction are explored and the various speech acts comprising them: (a) setting up the business at hand, and (b) requesting. The setting up of the business at hand is demonstrated to be a common tool in meetings to orient all participants to the agenda, thereby evoking behaviors and functions relevant to both leader and manager identity. Requesting also offers insights into how leader and manager identities are evoked in talk-in interaction, given that requests, as social actions, inherently entail the right and power to pursue particular goals. In particular authentic leader behavior was observed in the data. Considering these communicative events allows demonstrating the discursive co-construction of the employer's identity in interaction with her employees, focusing on the co-existing identities as leader and manager. In pulling together and utilizing key literature on authentic leadership and discursive identity construction for analytic purposes, the present study offers a novel, communication based view of leader identity as a set of enacted and thereby realized-as-oriented-to practices for organizing meetings between employers and employees.
