Interaction without walls: Analysing leadership discourse through dramaturgy and participation

Abstract

Goffman's dramaturgical model of interaction is often used to examine how communicative events are framed differently in public and private settings. However, this idea has restrictively been conflated with specific spatial locations. This paper contends that it is not the place where discourse is performed that styles it as front or backstage, but rather the stances taken in interactions, and the participation framework involved. Furthermore, backstage can be used to negotiate stances later performed frontstage, where they may index wider, ideological aspects of identity. This is demonstrated through the analysis of a sequence of linked backstage and frontstage interactions that involve two rugby coaches. The extracts presented and analysed take place in a New Zealand rugby team, a type of organisation in which space is particularly fluid. The dramaturgical model is demonstrated to be of use in examining leadership discourse within organisations, particularly in organisations in which multiple leaders exist.

Doing Leadership through Signswitching in theIndonesian Bureaucracy

“…Over the last 10–15 years sociolinguists have started expanding their focus on talk at work (e.g., Drew and Heritage ) to how talk figures in the doing of leadership (e.g., Baxter ; Fairhurst ; Fairhurst and Grant ; Holmes et al. ; Marra and Angouri ; Schnurr ; Schnurr and Chan ; Wilson ; Wodak et al. ).…”

“…Among other things, these scholars have been examining various interactional manifestations of the continuum between the doing of co‐leadership and distributed leadership (Holmes et al. ); how leadership talk relates to ideas of front stage and backstage (Wilson ); how leadership talk contributes to consensus building (Wodak et al. ); how situated leadership talk relates to wider circulating ideologies about leadership (Holmes et al.…”

“…); how situated leadership talk relates to wider circulating ideologies about leadership (Holmes et al. ; Wilson ; Wodak et al. ), and so on.…”

Comics with Drama: New Communication in Wedia

“…In recent years, scholars have proposed a "without walls" perspective. The back stage can be used to negotiate the stances that are later performed on the front stage, where wider and more ideological aspects of identity can be indexed [10]; thus, the wall between the front and the back stages are broken in Goffman's [7] dramaturgy. People can move through plots, which are actions especially apparent in the virtual world, on and off stage.…”

The Portable Locker Room

“…This has been used to analyse particular spaces as either front region or back region; for example, a school staff room is seen as a back region (Richards, 2010). However, as discussed elsewhere (Wilson, 2013), while specific spaces can be used habitually to enact either frontstage or backstage interactions, the same space can in fact be used for either, thus freeing the concept from discrete regions used for each. As demonstrated in this article, team sport provides many examples of this.…”