Gender, Politeness And Institutional Power Roles

Gender, address and institutional power roles:
Humour as a tactic to gain compliance
in workplace business meetings
LOUISE MULLANY
Abstract
This motif examines the complex relationship between sexual practice, well-behavedness
and institutional power roles by focusing on how meeting chairs utilise the
linguistic implement of humour in their look fors to gain the compliance of
subordinates in managerial business meetings. Following recent work in
language and gender studies, Brown and Levinsons (1987) politeness
model is rejected in save of a communities of practice approach to conceptualising
notions of linguistic politeness (Mills 2002). selective information are analysed
from six managerial business meetings taken from 2 ethnographic
case studies of businesses based in the UK. Following Holmes (2000: 175),
the notion of restrictive humour as a strategy of linguistic politeness is
adopted, whereby those who are enacting power disguise the oppressive
intent of their message by minimising the status differences between themselves
and their subordinates, a strategy that has resulted from the conversationalisation
of public intervention (Fairclough 1992).




There is clear evidence of the female chairs using the tactic of repressive
humour as a mitigation strategy to attempt to gain the compliance of their
subordinates, and this disproves the dominant stereotype that women lack
a good sense of humour in workplace interaction (cf. Holmes et al. 2001). However,
there is no evidence of the male chairs adopting this strategy. Whilst
this finding indicates evidence of gender patterning, this is not to suggest
that the female chairs are being more linguistically polite than their male
counterparts, as would be predicted by previous language and gender studies
(Holmes 1995). In all of their attempts to gain compliance, whilst male
chairs do not workout repressive humour, they do use a variety of mitigation
strategies to discipline that their attempts to gain compliance are not issued
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