Making Transportable Identities Relevant as a Persuasive Device. The Case of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 Concession Speech

Transportable identities are often extraneous in discourse, but they can be brought to the surface and made relevant, also as a means to persuade an audience. I discuss the case of the concession speech Hillary Rodham Clinton gave on June, 7th 2008 after she lost against Barack Obama in the Democratic Primaries. In order to successfully reposition herself from an opponent to a supporter of Obama, Clinton draws on several aspects of her transportable identity to stress the similarity between herself and Obama. Next to focusing on the fact that they are both Democrats, Americans and human beings, she zooms in on their membership of two powerless groups: namely that of women and African Americans. Both from a historical and a personal perspective, these two categorizations of herself and Obama are presented in a highly persuasive way and create unity between the two former opponents. As such, I not only show how identity, which relates to the concept of ethos in classical rhetorical terms, is discursively constructed in a speech, but also how it serves the argumentational goal of repositioning oneself entirely

Narratives as social practice in organisational contexts

Organizational studies, as a discipline, has displayed a strong interest in the use of narrative analysis to investigate issues of concern to scholars, such as those around sense-making, communication, politics and power, learning and change, as well as identity and identification (Rhodes & Brown, 2005). However, much, though of course not all, of this research has tended to focus on ‘big’ stories – i.e., “those derived from interviews, clinical encounters, autobiographical writing, and other such interrogative venues” (Freeman, 2006, p. 131) – and has paid little attention to small stories – i.e., “those derived from everyday social exchanges” (Freeman, 2006, p. 131; see also Georgakopoulou, 2006). Moreover, these ‘big’ stories are often analysed as decontextualized end-products (the outcome). Consequently, the fine-grained detail of the exact formulation of stories (the medium), which necessarily has an impact on the narrative as product, is often overlooked. Furthermore, other aspects of the storytelling activity, such as the extent to which narratives are told in collaboration with others – ranging from interviewers for ‘big’ stories to co-tellers for ‘small’ stories – and questions around why particular narratives are told at one particular point in time and place rather than at another tend to receive much less attention (though see Clifton et al., 2020). Yet, we argue that these aspects of storytelling are particularly deserving of academic attention. This is because they enable researchers to obtain a much more multi-facetted insight into how narratives are produced and how they work in the specific context in which they occur. This is exactly what a narrative as social practice-approach capitalizes on, namely the actual in situ telling of the stories (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2008). It has a clear emphasis on the analysis of stories as sequentially organized dialogic constructions which are embedded in the local business of the storytellers and which are rhetorically and recipient designed to ‘do things’ such as blaming, accounting for action, building acceptable moral identities, and so on

Social Actors “to Go”:An Analytical Toolkit to Explore Agency in Business Discourse and Communication

We argue that language awareness and discourse analytical skills should be part of business communication curricula. To this end, we propose a three-step analytical model drawing on organizational and critical discourse studies, and approaches from systemic-functional linguistics, to explore agency and action in business communication. Focusing on language and discourse helps students to analyze texts more systematically, researchers to gain deeper insights into organizational discourse, and practitioners to reflect on communication processes and produce texts with more impact. We view discourse as central to organizational processes and render a specific approach accessible and easy to integrate into business communication curricula

Women and leadership in higher education in China: discourse and the discursive construction of identity

Prior research indicates that just 4.5 percent of mainland China’s higher educational institution leaders are female. This article extends theory and research by drawing attention to identity and Discourse as an important, yet under-researched, aspect of the problem of women’s underrepresentation in higher education leadership. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with nine female academics in Chinese universities and informed by discursive approaches to identity and constructionist views, we analyze how women construct multiple identities, the interplay of identities, and the influence of broader societal Discourses of gender and leadership. The findings highlight the interplay between competing multiple identities, and illustrate how the women’s identities are shaped and constrained by dominant historical and cultural Discourses in Chinese society, which results in identity regulation (Alvesson and Billing 2009), notably identity positioning that is congruent with social norms and conventions. A key finding is that the female academics reject the leader identity. This is true for those in middle management positions, as well as women in early career stages, who might otherwise aspire to leadership. Implications for the leadership pipeline in China’s universities is discussed and recommendations are made for future research directions

Rendering sexism invisible in workplace narratives. A narrative analysis of female entrepreneurs’ stories of not being talked to by men

Taking a social constructionist and narrative approach to identity, in the analyses of a corpus of stories concerning sexism in the entrepreneurial world, we use positioning theory to provide a fine-grained analysis of the (gendered) identity work that female entrepreneurs perform to answer three research questions: 1) how female entrepreneurs themselves construct their (gendered) identities 2) how this differs from, or resembles, academic constructs of sexism and 3) what this identity work ‘means’ in terms of larger societal Discourses or ideologies that are invoked. Findings suggest that paradoxically these stories construct gender identities in which the female entrepreneurs are positioned as inferior to, and different from, their male interlocutors. However, the interviewees themselves fail to evaluate their stories as sexism-in-action. Consequently, they enforce and (re)create the often noted masculine and sexist nature of the entrepreneurial world

Cultic resilience and inter-city engagement at the dawn of urban history: protohistoric Mesopotamia and the ‘city seals’, 3200-2750 BC

Within the context of early urbanism, elite groups developed the world’s earliest writing in Mesopotamia, 3200-2750 BC, comprising administrative documents in the form of inscribed clay tablets. How did these proto-literate urban communities engage with each other and what strategies did they employ to address major challenges to their survival? The ‘city seal’ evidence survives as seal impressions on clay bureaucratic artefacts, both inscribed tablets and impressed sealings. These impressions feature signs representing the names of Mesopotamian cities, many of them identifiable with known sites. The documents stand at the threshold of history, as the earliest evidence for inter-city engagement. Using an innovative methodology and interpretive framework of cultic resilience, we integrate archaeometric, iconographic, and functional analyses of the earliest stages of writing and sealing, to argue that the city seal evidence provides unique insights into inter-city cooperation by Mesopotamian cities during a critical episode of early urban development

On Babylonian lavatories and sewers

This study begins by examining the archaeological and documentary evidence for lavatories (toilets) and foul-water drains in ancient Mesopotamian dwelling houses. It goes on to investigate the use, etymology and history of the Akkadian word asurrû: in the Old Babylonian period it served mainly as a term for a kind of foul-water drain or “sewer” but later shed that meaning