Re-examining linguistic power: strategic uses of directives by professional Japanese women in positions of authority and leadership

Abstract

Given that an increasing number of professional women are playing a traditionally male role of authority and leadership in Japanese society today, it has been suggested that Japanese women in leadership positions suffer from a ‘sociolinguistic dilemma’ in choosing between the culturally prescribed feminine ways of speaking and the communicative need to talk powerfully from their occupational statuses. While conflicting views are derived from either anecdotal evidence or small-scale pilot studies, no large-scale empirical investigation of natural workplace interactions has presented a comprehensive picture of the issue. This paper analyzes nine female executives’ uses of directive speech acts that were both tape-recorded and observed in a large number of workplace interactions. Moving beyond the traditional sentence-level analysis of the use of feminine (or masculine) morphosyntactic variants, the study accounts for the following as the linguistic solutions to the dilemma: (1) the strategies of contextualization, which empower the ‘gender-preferred’ polite, indirect framing of directives in the larger domain of discourse; (2) the uses of positive-polite rapport builders for symmetrical interpersonal relationships and voluntary collaboration; and (3) the activation of multiple identities through marked uses of polite language in the immediate context of use. The study concludes that co-constitutive relationships between language and context, rather than the powerful (or powerless) code structure per se, are the key to an understanding of linguistic power manipulated by Japanese female executives, and also suggests that strategic functions of positive politeness need to be explored more extensively in studies of Japanese interactions in general.