'Identity' is a central organizing feature of our social world. Across the social sciences and humanities, it is increasingly treated as something that is actively and publicly accomplished in ...discourse. This book defines identity in its broadest sense, in terms of how people display who they are to each other. Each chapter examines a different discursive environment in which people do 'identity work': everyday conversation, institutional settings, narrative and stories, commodified contexts, spatial locations, and virtual environments. The authors describe and demonstrate a range of discourse and interaction analytic methods as they are put to use in the study of identity, including 'performative' analyses, conversation analysis, membership categorization analysis, critical discourse analysis, narrative analysis, positioning theory, discursive psychology and politeness theory. The book aims to give readers a clear sense of the coherence (or otherwise) of these different approaches, the practical steps taken in analysis, and their situation within broader critical debates. Through the use of detailed and original 'identity' case studies in a variety of spoken and written texts in order, the book offers a practical and accessible insight into what the discursive accomplishment of identity actually looks like, and how to go about analyzing it.
Features:
*Accessible introduction to the study of discourse and identity across a variety of contexts.
*Interdisciplinary in scope, the book is relevant to a wide range of courses such as English language and linguistics, psychology, media, cultural studies, gender studies and sociology.
*Each chapter includes a critical overview of work in the area, original case studies, practical instruction for analyses, points for further discussion and suggested reading.
This paper examines how callers to an NHS complaints helpline get to “tell their story.” As project-based institutional calls, the closure of a complaints call is observably organized around ...“mutually ratified project completion.” Our analysis reveals the practices that callers deploy to resist call handlers' (CH) progress through the institutional phase structure of the call, thus also resisting ratification of their project as complete. We show how these practices are varyingly oriented to (re-)telling elements of the complaint or pursuing legitimation of their complaint and/or identity as “reasonable.” Callers’ resistance to institutional progressivity is oriented to misalignment in the prior uptake of their complaint narrative, revealing the relationship between projects and “identities” in the context of helpline interactions and the tension between the separate projects of caller and CH.
Abstract
Background
Healthcare complaints are grievances that may be indicative of some system failures, individual failings, or a combination of both. Moreover, the experience of making a complaint, ...including its outcome, often falls short of patient expectations, particularly in relation to the interpersonal conduct of National Health Service (NHS) staff. Over half of unresolved (local) complaints are subsequently upheld by the ombudsman with others potentially resulting in costly litigation.
Method
A nuanced discourse analytical approach to analysing the language choices within complaint-responses could potentially provide greater insight into why many local complaints continue to remain unresolved. Over a period of 1 month we collated a data corpus of written complaints and their responses (
n
= 60) from an NHS healthcare area in Scotland, United Kingdom (UK) following anonymisation by NHS complaint handling staff. We took a qualitative approach to analysing the data drawing upon Discourse Analysis with this paper reporting on the complaint-responses only (
n
= 59). We had undertaken a similar review of the initial written complaints and this is reported elsewhere. In this paper we examine
how, and to what extent
, the complaint-responses fully addressed the complainants’ perceived grievances.
Results
The complaint-responses rarely acknowledged the amount of detail or ‘work’ involved in making the complaint. Complaint-responses constructed complainants’ accounts as subjective by using specific discourse strategies. Further, complaint responses used unintentionality or exceptionality to mitigate sub-standard experiences of care. We also observed the ‘fauxpology’ - a non-apology or false apology (e.g. I am sorry
you feel
) which imputes the cause of distress to the subjective (and possibly misguided) impressions of the complainant. The complaint-responses thereby evade blame or responsibility for the complainable action by implying that the complainants’ feelings do not align with the facts.
Conclusions
Complainants and complaint-responders work to different frames of reference. Complaint responders need to engage and align with complainants from the outset to ensure more appropriate complaint- responses. Complaint resolution as opposed to complaint handling could be enhanced by the approach of linguistic analysis and reference to the consumer literature’s justice-based approach to post-complaint behaviour.
Without readers and audiences, viewers and consumers, the postcolonial would be literally unthinkable. And yet, postcolonial critics have historically neglected the modes of reception and consumption ...that make up the politics, and pleasures of meaning-making during and after empire. Thus, while recent criticism and theory has made large claims for reading; as an ethical act; as a means of establishing collective, quasi-political consciousness; as identification with difference; as a mode of resistance; and as an impulsion to the public imagination, the reader in postcolonial literary studies persists as a shadowy figure. This collection answers the now pressing need for a distinctively postcolonial take on the rapidly expanding area of reader and reception studies. Written by some of the top scholars in the field, these essays reveal readers and reception to be varied and profoundly unstable subjects that challenge many of our assumptions and preconceptions of the postcolonial - from the notion of reading as national fellowship to the demands of an ethics of reading.
Research on patients' complaints about healthcare has tended to focus on the typology of complaints and complainants to homogenise complaints and better understand safety implications. Nonetheless, ...complaints speak to a broader spectrum of harm and suffering that go beyond formal adverse events. Complaints about care episodes can take considerable time and effort, generate negative energy and may leave a dogged 'minority' embittered.
This study provides an overview of the process and rhetoric of how patients formulate written complaints. We collated a data corpus comprising 60 letters of complaints and their responses over a period of one month. This paper focuses on the complaint letters only. National Health Service (NHS) Complaint Department staff in a healthcare area in the United Kingdom (UK) anonymized the letters. We took a broad qualitative approach to analysing the data drawing upon Discourse Analysis focusing on the rhetorical and persuasive strategies employed by the complainants.
What patients complained about related to how they complained, with complainants expending considerable effort in persuasive rhetoric that sought to legitimise the complaint drawing upon different sources of epistemic authority. The complainants struggle to be an 'objective' witness as the complaint evolves from an implicit neglect narrative to increasing 'noise' with other features such as Direct Reported Speech used to animate and authenticate the narrative. Many of the complex complaints appeared to evidence some psychological distress. This was associated with the complainants' reports of experiencing cumulative poor health care and their repeated failure to resolve the complaint. The subsequent delicate and potentially stigmatized formal act of complaining was a source of additional distress.
Complaints are involved narratives often predicated on the expectation they will not be given due credence. Health care staff may benefit from understanding how complaints are formulated to be able to more appropriately address the focus and extent of patients' grievances from the outset and therefore, reduce the considerable associated harm.
The aim of this paper is to explore possible discourse and conversation analytical approaches to articulations of masculinity in and around sites of popular culture. The research presented in this ...paper arises from work on the relationship between men’s magazines, constructions/discourses of masculinity and lived cultures of masculinity. My particular interest in this paper is to explore the process by which we assign gendered identities to familiar cultural discourses, and in doing so, to engage critically with the ideas of Cameron and Kulick (2003; 2005) who have postulated a distinction between ‘identity’ and ‘identification’ as a means of reconceiving the relationship between discourse and sexuality. By adopting an ethnomethodological approach to conversational data, I will argue that it is possible to demonstrate how gendered identities - both the explicit alignments and claim-staking of ‘identity’ work, as well as the more ambivalent, shifting and contradictory footings that could be thought to characterise ‘identification’ - are available for analysis on the surface of talk. In a final analysis, I move beyond strict ethnomethodological principles in order to extend this consideration of ‘identity’ and ‘identification’ to a particular popular discourse - that of ‘gross out’ - whose intuitive labelling as masculine can be traced and supported by the forms and contexts of the various intertexts within which it occurs.
This article explores the rhetorical accomplishment by British book group members of anti-racist identities through their discussions of fictional texts in exploring themes of race and immigration. ...'Common-sense anti-racism' is a social action or stance that is presented as self-evidently taken by speakers, yet explicitly flagged at the same time. Speakers in book group discussions routinely display enlightened, anti-racist views, principally by invoking the figure of the 'racist other' and their reported speech. Many of the examples of reported speech do not involve explicit markers of quotation or shifts in footing, meaning that the attribution of certain utterances to a racist 'other' relies on an assumption of shared values. The article questions why anti-racism tends to be packaged as an accountable matter in need of some impression management in the way that racism often is, and concludes that this is linked to the way in which it operates in contexts where anxieties around issues of race and racism continue to exist.
Health-care interactions often involve social, relational, small-talk, or "off-task" sequences that are largely topically distinct from the institutional business of the setting. In this article we ...examine data from preoperative assessment sessions in a Scottish hospital in order to explore the transitions between on- and off-task talk. In the majority of instances, the movement between social and medical talk is routine and unproblematic, and both nurse and patient orient to the boundaried nature of off-topic talk. However, occasionally patients' social talk evolves into personal disclosure and troubles telling that may disrupt the institutional agenda and that can lead to difficulties in the negotiation of sequence closure. Data are in British English.
Callers making a complaint share their negative experience in complaint narratives that make relevant affiliation from an operator. We examined how call handlers’ language choices affect both the ...progress of the call and the stance of the caller.
We identified episodes where affiliation is displayed or noticeably absent in a dataset of 95 complaints calls to the NHS. Two single cases were closely examined using conversation analysis.
Affiliation at sequentially relevant moments in conversation helps progress the call and de-escalate the complaint while the absence or misplacement of affiliation may lead to escalation. The latter recurringly involves blaming whilst de-escalation includes practices that diffuse blame. Early intervention in the form of affiliation to the ‘hurt’ component and the reasoning of the complaint is essential to de-escalation.
Our analysis revealed three key functions of affiliation in complaints calls: 1) ratifying the reasonableness of the complaint; 2) progressing the institutional requirements of the call; 3) de-escalating the complaint.
Call handlers should listen for callers’ cues for legitimization of the complainability of their concerns and seek to provide responses that express affiliation.
•The interactional objectives of complainants and complaint handlers are often in tension.•Affiliation helps progress the call and de-escalate the complaint.•Relevantly absent affiliation may lead to escalation including explicit blaming.•Appeals to reason interact with hurt & blame in the action formation of the complaints.•Attending to the action formation of a complaint supports detailed analysis of escalation.
Ironic Discourse Benwell, Bethan
Men and masculinities,
07/2004, Volume:
7, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article takes as its textual focus the U.K. men’s lifestyle magazine and explores the notion that irony is strategically employed in the partial constitution (and evasion) of a specific ...masculine identity. It is frequently claimed that irony is a prominent feature of the postmodern condition, with its slippery ability to disclaim allegiances to particularpolitical or critical positions; within the men’s lifestyle magazine, we can see how irony functions both to give voice to reactionary and antifeminist sentiments and to continually destabilize the notion of a coherent and visible masculinity. The article focuses on both irony as a trope and irony as a mode of existence in the pursuit of describing the ambiguity inherent in magazine masculinity, and it engages with close textual and linguistic analysis of a magazine feature and an interview.
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