Volume 40, Issue 1 -

Questioning the assumption that identities can be controlled through a shared organisational culture, the article explores the dispersion of a discourse of diversity into leadership identities in a Danish bank and building society. Underlying this focus is the question of whether a number of local and global influences may interact and lead to the adoption of a shared organisational and leadership norms, identifiable in managers’ constructions of leadership identities. To study these issues, a critical discourse analysis is carried out of interviews with two middle managers in the bank, which involves close analysis of the language used by the respondents to construct their leadership identities. While the respondents present comparable identities to the interviewer, the analysis reveals that the they draw on different discourses and sources of inspiration as well as employ a number of different discursive means to present their respective identities. This, the article argues, may be the result of a number of influences emerging from the individual style of the respondent, the context of the interview and the discourses present both within and outside the organisation.

How does a novel like Middlemarch cohere, since it is made up of at least two very different kinds of text, narrative on the one hand and dialogue on the other? In this paper, we look to two authorities: to literature, where authors seem to agree that it is consistency in voice that holds both narrators and characters together, and to linguistics, where a computerized corpus allows us to measure variation between and within characters. Where previous researchers found unsystematic variations, we find meta-stability: characters remain true to themselves only through variation. The way in which Dorothea addresses her future husband differs from the way she addresses her little sister in Chapter Five of Middlemarch but this is in turn a special case of differences between the way in which Dorothea addresses men and the way in which she addresses women. Such a difference serves to symbolically articulate a key theme of Eliot’s novel – the middle ground that every woman must occupy in the march from the world of our forefathers through that of our husbands to that of our children.

Television instructional cooking shows provide a platform for discussion around the performance of self, with bloopers and backstage scenes revealing the best qualities of the celebrity chef’s personality despite the risk of face loss. Bloopers are short clips of mistakes that are typically removed from the media narrative. Often embarrassing and humorous, bloopers are moments when the celebrity chef’s performance is flawed with cooking errors or misspoken words. Drawing on Goffman’s concepts of ‘backstage’ and ‘frontstage,’ this paper analyzes bloopers on five American instructional cooking shows: The French Chef with Julia Child, considered one of the first celebrity chefs on television, and four contemporary how-to cooking shows from Food Network. These shows present cases of bloopers that occur in live and edited scenes, during the cooking demonstration, and pre- and post-filming. While a form of backstage discourse, bloopers support frontstage performance by heightening the celebrity chef’s unique attributes. Bloopers provide an outlet for play on frontstage as well.

In May 2017, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, popularly known as Ahok, the former Christian governor of Jakarta, Indonesia, was found guilty of blasphemy and sentenced to two years in prison. Although he was released in January 2019, his trial and the various reactions it elicited continue to highlight the very sensitive and complex issues surrounding the notion and enforcement of blasphemy and how different communities talk about it. This article focuses on a discussion about the trial between an Indonesian Muslim in favor of the blasphemy charge and an Indonesian Christian opposed to it. Using positioning analysis, it investigates how their conversation in English at a University in Japan exhibited an occasioned, fluid, developing range of evaluative language, both in terms of how they talked about themselves and others. The analysis demonstrates the complex interplay and consistent tension that is often present in inter-religious dialogue, and tracks how a wide array of discourse and contextual factors relate to developing positions, storylines, expressions of social power, and strategies for conflict management. We conclude by highlighting the inherent complexity of the dynamics of such interaction and how it can lead to greater convergence and/or tension, while emphasizing the potential benefits of face-to-face conversations around issues of possible conflict.

This article examines the claim of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) that violations of RST diagram formation principles indicate coherence breaks. In doing so, this article makes a significant contribution to the testing of RST. More broadly, it indicates that examining the coherence-break identification potential of coherence theories could help specify each theory’s purview and, in the long term, lead to the creation of hybrid models of coherence. Moreover, it paves the way for the development of training resources on discourse (in)coherence for language teachers, exam markers and language learners. 84 paragraphs written by Taiwanese learners of English were analysed according to RST and coherence measures were calculated on the basis of this analysis. The results suggest that the violation of any diagram-formation principle indicates coherence breaks, thus corroborating this RST claim. Inter- and intrajudge agreement in terms of both RST coding and coherence measures calculated on the basis of coherence breaks are reported and discussed. The kinds of coherence breaks which are and are not located by RST analysis are discussed and exemplified. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for pedagogy and future research.