‘It’s a blokes’ thing’: Gender, Occupational Roles and Talk in the Workplace

Abstract

This chapter explores the link between gender, occupational roles and relative status in spoken interaction in the workplace. The analysis is based on extracts from business meetings where disagreement occurs between speakers, and focuses on key methodological issues concerning the interpretative process. More specifically, the discussion considers whether gender is relevant to the interpretation of the talk. To this end, two different analytical approaches are applied — a strict Conversational Analytical (CA) approach that relies solely on transcripts of the data to interpret the meaning of the interaction, combined with an analysis that draws on wider interpretative resources, such as participant feedback, information about the companies the participants work for, observation and employment statistics.KeywordsOccupational RoleGender ResearchWorkplace PracticeSpeech StyleInterpretative RepertoireThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.