Positioning oneself in relation to larger collectivities in expatriates’ workplace narratives

Abstract

Original citation: Schnurr, Stephanie, 1975-, van de Mieroop, Dorien and Zayts, Olga. (2014) 'Positioning oneself in relation to larger collectivities in expatriates' workplace narratives. Narrative Inquiry, Volume 24 (Number 2). 386 -407. Permanent WRAP url:http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/66831 Copyright and reuse:The Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) makes this work of researchers of the University of Warwick available open access under the following conditions. Copyright © and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable the material made available in WRAP has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-forprofit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. This article aims to explore narratives as sites for identity construction by employing the concept of positioning to analyse some of the discursive processes through which identity construction is accomplished in institutional contexts. Our specific foci are i) the ways in which individuals position themselves in relation to larger collectivities in their narratives about being expatriates living and working in Hong Kong, and ii) how they construct their professional identities in the tension that may arise due to their membership in different social groups. Drawing on data from a corpus of interviews with professionals in multicultural workplaces in Hong Kong, we provide an in-depth analysis of two case studies of expatriates who take very different stances towards their company and the cultural groups with whom they interact, and who, as a consequence, construct remarkably different identities for themselves, the people they work with and also their organisation. Our analyses illustrate some of the intricate ways in which identities are closely intertwined with and feed off individuals' membership in different collectivities, which surfaces especially when zooming in on the different levels of positioning in the interviewees' narratives.

“That’s not a man’s drink”. The construction of gendered identities through stories of wine consumption in Kenya

“…Positioning theory is a form of narrative analysis that uses the fine-grained analysis of transcripts of storytelling talk to investigate how the storytellers “describe people and their actions in one way, rather than another and, by doing so perform discursive actions that result in acts of identity” (Bamberg et al , 2011, p. 182). Focusing on localized interaction, positioning theory has been influenced by conversation analysis (Sacks, 1992), which requires fine-grained linguistic analyzes of the in situ occasioning of identities as they emerge within specific sequences of talk (Bamberg and Andrews, 2004; Jones and Clifton, 2018; Schnurr et al , 2014). The advantage of using positioning theory is that it does not decontextualize the storytelling by a process of rearranging decontextualized snippets of the interaction, through, for example, a process of coding, to reveal descriptions from which central tendencies are then abstracted.…”

An Analysis of Identity Construction in Interactional Narratives by Women with Turner Syndrome

“…An analysis based on the first level positioning shows how characters are construed within the story events, for example as agents, targets, protagonists or antagonists. At the second level, the analysis takes into consideration the purpose of the narrative, its setting and its co-construction by both the narrator and their audience (Schnurr, Van De Mieroop & Zayts, 2014) whereas the third level analysis deals with how narrators construct themselves as particular kinds of people (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008: 391), and this extends beyond the level of the storytelling situation to larger socio-cultural discourses. The third level is claimed to connect the first two levels "which are related to the narrated events in the here and now of the storytelling situation to speakers' ways of making sense of their identities within wider terms of understanding as provided by global macro discourses" (Al-Bundawi 2019: 44).…”