Constructing Identities at Work

Through language we show who we are and where we belong. In the workplace context this includes the way we construct ourselves as the team leader, meeting chair, a good colleague, the judge, a teacher orresearcher. Constructing Identities at Work presents cutting edge research on the process of identity construction in professional and institutional contexts, from corporate workplaces, to courtrooms, classrooms, and academia. The authors illustrate the range of foci, methodologies and approaches prevalent in the newly established field of workplace discourse, demonstrating how interactants do identity work and how identity is 'indexed' (often in subtle ways) in workplace discourse. Moving beyond unhelpful static universalities about how all women, all English-speakers, or all old people behave linguistically, each of the authors emphasises the contextualised nature of our everyday lives and the ways in which we negotiate and renegotiate our emerging identities with others. Among the chapters there are examples of a range of different theoretical approaches to identity in linguistics, from the prevalent social constructionist lens to the micro-level detail accessible through Conversation Analysis, and the quantitative analysis offered by corpus linguistics.