Double-voicing at work:power, gender and linguistic expertise

'Double-voicing' means that when a person speaks, they have a heightened awareness of the concerns and agendas of others, which is reflected in the ways they adjust their language in response to interlocutors. The Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin famously applied the concept of 'double-voiced discourse' to the world of literature, but just touched upon its relevance to everyday language. This book reveals how 'double-voicing' is an inherent and routine part of spoken interactions within educational and professional contexts. Double-voicing is closely related to the ways in which power relations are constructed between speakers, as it is often used by less powerful speakers to negotiate perceived threats from more powerful others. The book explores how women leaders use double-voicing more than men as a means of gaining acceptance and approval in the workplace. While double-voicing at times indexes a speaker's linguistic insecurity, the book argues that it can be harnessed to demonstrate linguistic expertise

Discourse-analytic approaches to text and talk

This chapter explores the different ways in which discourse-analytic approaches reveal the ‘meaningfulness’ of text and talk. It reviews four diverse approaches to discourse analysis of particular value for current research in linguistics: Conversation Analysis (CA), Discourse Analysis (DA), Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Feminist Post-structuralist Discourse Analysis (FPDA). Each approach is examined in terms of its background, motivation, key features, and possible strengths and limitations in relation to the field of linguistics. A key way to schematize discourse-analytic methodology is in terms of its relationship between microanalytical approaches, which examine the finer detail of linguistic interactions in transcripts, and macroanalytical approaches, which consider how broader social processes work through language (Heller, 2001). This chapter assesses whether there is a strength in a discourse-analytic approach that aligns itself exclusively with either a micro- or macrostrategy, or whether, as Heller suggests, the field needs to fi nd a way of ‘undoing’ the micro–macro dichotomy in order to produce richer, more complex insights within linguistic research

The language of female leadership

Could language be a reason why women are under-representedat senior level in the business world? The Language of Female Leadership investigates how female leaders actually use language to achieve their business and relational goals. The author proposes that the language of women leaders is shaped by the type of corporation they work for. Based on the latest research, three types of ‘gendered corporation’ appear to affect the way women interact with colleagues: the male-dominated,the gender-divided and the gender-multiple. This book shows that senior women have to carry out extra ‘linguistic work’ to make their mark in the boardroom. In male-dominated and gender-divided corporations, women must develop an extraordinarylinguistic expertise just to survive. In gender-multiple corporations, this linguistic expertise helps them to be highly regarded and effective leaders.Judith Baxter lectures in Applied Linguistics at the University of Aston. She has written and edited many publications in the field of language and gender, language and education and the language of leadership. She won a government award to conduct a major research study in the language of female leadership

A strong immune response in young adult honeybees masks their increased susceptibility to infection compared to older bees

Honeybees, Apis mellifera, show age-related division of labor in which young adults perform maintenance ("housekeeping") tasks inside the colony before switching to outside foraging at approximately 23 days old. Disease resistance is an important feature of honeybee biology, but little is known about the interaction of pathogens and age-related division of labor. We tested a hypothesis that older forager bees and younger "house" bees differ in susceptibility to infection. We coupled an infection bioassay with a functional analysis of gene expression in individual bees using a whole genome microarray. Forager bees treated with the entomopathogenic fungus Metarhizium anisopliae s.l. survived for significantly longer than house bees. This was concomitant with substantial differences in gene expression including genes associated with immune function. In house bees, infection was associated with differential expression of 35 candidate immune genes contrasted with differential expression of only two candidate immune genes in forager bees. For control bees (i.e. not treated with M. anisopliae) the development from the house to the forager stage was associated with differential expression of 49 candidate immune genes, including up-regulation of the antimicrobial peptide gene abaecin, plus major components of the Toll pathway, serine proteases, and serpins. We infer that reduced pathogen susceptibility in forager bees was associated with age-related activation of specific immune system pathways. Our findings contrast with the view that the immunocompetence in social insects declines with the onset of foraging as a result of a trade-off in the allocation of resources for foraging. The up-regulation of immune-related genes in young adult bees in response to M. anisopliae infection was an indicator of disease susceptibility; this also challenges previous research in social insects, in which an elevated immune status has been used as a marker of increased disease resistance and fitness without considering the effects of age-related development

Effects of portion size on chronic energy intake

© 2007 Jeffery et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licens

Participant Experiences in the Environmental Determinants of Diabetes in the Young Study: Common Reasons for Withdrawing

Background. To characterize participant reasons for withdrawing from a diabetes focused longitudinal clinical observational trial (TEDDY) during the first three study years. Methods. 8677 children were recruited into the TEDDY study. At participant withdrawal staff recorded any reason parents provided for withdrawal. Reasons were categorized into (1) family characteristics and (2) protocol reasons. Families who informed staff of their withdrawal were classified as active withdrawals (AW); families without a final contact were considered passive withdrawals (PW). Results. Withdrawal was highest during the first study year . Most families were AW (; 73.4%). PW was more common in the United States (; 37.8%) and among young mothers . The most frequent protocol characteristic was blood draw (55%) and the most common family reason was not having enough time (66%). The blood draw was more common among female participants; being too busy was more common among males. Both reasons were associated with study satisfaction. Conclusions. Results suggest that, for families of children genetically at risk for diabetes, procedures that can be painful/frightening should be used with caution. Study procedures must also be considered for the demands placed on participants. Study satisfaction should be regularly assessed as an indicator of risk for withdrawal

Causes of Multiple Sclerosis: a functional genomics approach

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is the most common disabling neurological disease affecting young adults in Western Society. To date, 55 strongly associated single nucleotide polymorphisms have been discovered. We now need to identify causal genes. While T-cells as targets for therapeutic intervention have rarely proven useful, there is strong clinical and in-vitro data identifying NK cell deficiencies in patients, and key roles for monocytes in myelin and axon destruction and autoantigen presentation. RNA extracted from magnetic bead sorted monocytes and NK cells, of healthy controls (HC) and untreated patients with relapsing remitting MS (RRMS), was labelled and hybridised to Affymetrix Human Gene 1.0 ST arrays. Expression values were standardized across chips using RMA and quantile normalization as implemented in GenePattern. Genes were ranked by expression difference significance by Mann Whitney U test and ANOVA. To date, we have analysed monocytes of 30 patients and 39 HC, and NK cells from 25 patients and 32 HC. Expression differences of those genes adjacent to MS associated risk SNPs lying between 110kb upstream and 40kb downstream of a candidate gene were considered. We have identified three genes worthy of further analysis on this basis: RGS1, HHEX and THEMIS. To test the relevance of these candidates to central nervous system (CNS) autoimmunity, we aim to mimic phenotypes associated with these expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) in in-vitro cultures of purified NK cells and monocytes, and in-vivo in a mouse model of MS - experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE)

Resolving a gender and language problem in women’s leadership:consultancy research in workplace discourse

This article considers the contribution that consultancy research might make to resolving communication problems that women have identified in their leadership practices. Within the intersecting fields of gender and language and workplace discourse, consultancy research-that is, practitioner-commissioned research to resolve work-related, communication problems-is still uncommon. This article presents a study of Monika, a senior leader in an engineering company, who commissioned me to find out why she was experiencing communication problems with her teams. By using interactional sociolinguistic analysis, I was able to show Monika how her authority was being resisted on gendered, linguistic grounds. In making the case for more consultancy research, I discuss how we might use insights from discourse analysis to offer guidance to practitioners seeking our help

Open science in archaeology

No abstract available