Análisis de la variación, eficiencia y eficacia de los gastos, periodo 2018

The discursive construction of identity has been widely studied in applied linguistics (e.g. Mean 2001, Coates, 1996, Bucholtz, Liang and Sutton 1999, Collins 2005, Cameron and Kulick 2003, Duff 2002, Hall et al. 1999, Benwell and Stokoe 2006).

In business meetings at the workplace, Holmes and her colleagues (1999) demonstrate the discursive construction of the professional identity of a manager. Senior staff enacted their authority status through speech acts such as setting the agenda, summarising progress, closing interactions and expressing approval, and the use of discourse strategies such as emphatic rhetorical devices and the control of turn-taking and topic-management which

42 function to express power and influence. In a more unpredictable situation, Farrell (2000) shows how employees at the interface of traditional workplace discourses and globalising ‘Quality’ discourses negotiate new ‘working’ identities in talk.

Hall and his colleagues (1999) showed professional identity constructed through the differentiation of institutional roles between participants and how that role differentiation is enacted through discursive means. A striking example of the social worker’s construction of professional identity is provided in the latter’s response to the client’s suggestion of ‘outside help’ (1999:301) which was perceived by the latter as a challenge to her professional role since she was meant to provide the help the client needed. Evidently, the social worker’s picture of her professional self was different from the client’s, reminding us about what is involved in the social construction of the self: ‘the individual must rely on others to complete the picture of him of which he himself is allowed to paint only certain parts’ (Goffman 1956:493). The social worker attempts to paint more parts of this picture and construct her role as legitimate and her client as the object of social work intervention. She establishes her role as the legitimate help needed by the client by clarifying the latter’s needs and volunteering to talk to the children. She also appeals to her experience with children in similar situations, emphasises her familiarity and regular contact with the children and promises to clarify the situation with them (1999:302).

In professional socialisation studies, writers have showed the construction of professional identity by novices in and through talk. In Erickson (1999) mentioned in the earlier section, the writer showed a medical intern constructing professional identity through using technical language and formal/informal registers in interactions with his preceptor. In a rather different setting, Jacobs-Huey (1999) demonstrated the acquisition of a ‘professional voice’ by students at a cosmetology institute as they trained to become professional hair stylists. In the specific ‘discourse events/activities through which students were socialised

43 to and through language (1999:28) i.e. role-play, hair care narratives, ‘master’ narrative/textbooks, hair theory exams, client-student stylist negotiations and student interviews with salon owners, the student hair stylists were shown to acquire a professional voice through co-constructing with their teachers theories about professional language skills in hair theory classes, developing this voice in client-stylist interactions and engaging with the ideological and discursive construction of their expert identities as ‘hair doctors’.

Underlying the conception of identity in the above studies is the notion of a social construction of the self through discourse i.e. the idea that ‘identity is actively, ongoingly, dynamically constituted in discourse’ (Benwell and Stokoe 2006:3). Widdicombe and Wooffitt put it succintly:

Identity is not seen as a thing that we are, a property of individuals, but as something we do. It is a practical accomplishment, achieved and maintained through the detail of language use. (Widdicombe and Wooffitt 1995:133)

Following the examples in these studies, this research also takes the view of ‘identity as a verb’ (Roberts and Sarangi 1999:229) and of its construction through actions in talk. It studies the constructed identities in localised interactions between trainee cooks and workers.

Although talk, in getting things done i.e. constructing identities, is treated as a form of action, it is one among a group of salient actions observed and it does not occupy a privileged position in this research. Unlike most studies in applied linguistic research which are based in contexts that are rich in linguistic data and which treat verbal and textual discourse as primary data sources, the current study is set in the action-oriented, rather than language-based, context of the professional kitchen.

44 In this context, physical action rather than verbal discourse dominated work activities. To avoid as far as possible a distorted representation of the work setting, the work activities in them and the trainee experience of this workplace which this research set out to describe, the analysis of the interactions was embedded in and regulated by the overarching ethnographic endeavour (Hak 1999:448). Thus, instead of extracting the available linguistic data (i.e. talk data) and basing the analysis wholly on that, which would have constituted only one aspect of the overall work experience of trainee cooks, this research has relied on the ethnographic data from participant observation and fieldnotes as its starting point and as the basis for the analysis of linguistic data. In other words, the discursive construction of identities is situated within the larger analysis of the trainee experience of work placement.