Journal Title: Discourse & Communication
Article Number: 691867
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481317691867
Discourse & Communication
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DOI: 10.1177/1750481317691867
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Mobilizing master narratives
through categorical narratives
and categorical statements
when default identities
are at stake[AQ: 1]
Dorien Van De Mieroop
KU Leuven, Belgium
Marlene Miglbauer
University College of Teacher Education Burgenland, Austria
Abha Chatterjee
Indian Institute of Management Indore, India
Abstract
In research interviews, interviewees are usually well aware why they were selected and in their
narratives, they often construct ‘default identities’ in line with the interviewers’ expectations.
Furthermore, narrators draw on shared cultural knowledge and master narratives that tend to
form an implicit backdrop of their stories. Yet, in this article, we focus on how some of these
master narratives may be mobilized explicitly when default identities are at stake. In particular, we
investigate interviews with successful female professionals from diverse geographical contexts.
We found that the interviewees deal with challenges to their ‘successful professional’-identities
by drawing on categorical narratives or categorical statements. As such, the interviewees talk into
being a morally ordered gendered worldview, thus making explicit gendered master narratives
about their societies and workplaces. In general, this article shows that categorical narratives and
statements can bring – the typically rather elusive – master narratives to the surface and that
these can thus contribute to the narrators’ identity work.
Corresponding author:
Dorien Van De Mieroop, Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, KU Leuven, Blijde Inkomststraat 21,
P.O. Box 3308, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.
Email: dorien.vandemieroop@arts.kuleuven.be
0010.1177/1750481317691867Discourse & CommunicationVan De Mieroop et al.
research-article2017
Article
2 Discourse & Communication
Keywords
Belgium, ‘big D’ Discourse, categorical narrative, categorical statements, category-bound
activities, Croatia, discourse, discourse analysis, gender, generic 2nd person pronoun, generic
narrative, identity, India, master narratives, narrative analysis, research interviews, story type,
storytelling, workplace
Introduction
A decade ago, the ‘centrality of narrative as a privileged locus for the negotiation of
identities’ was already widely accepted (De Fina et al., 2006: 16), and research that illus-
trates how telling stories, in particular narratives of personal experience, forms an
‘important means by which we communicate this sense of self and negotiate it with oth-
ers’ (Linde, 1993: 3) is vast. From the currently generally accepted social constructionist
perspective in discourse analysis, identity is regarded as a construct that interlocutors
talk into being in every single stretch of talk and it is pluralized, as interlocutors can
construct a wide variety of locally emergent identities. In spite of this endless potential,
narrators typically construct not just any identity: when telling a story, narrators tend to
present themselves as good people ‘who behave[s] correctly’ (Linde, 1993: 31).
Constructing such good identities may require extensive discursive work. For example,
narrators’ identities may be challenged by other interlocutors who are present in the sto-
rytelling context, as has been extensively illustrated for collaborative tellings (see
Georgakopoulou, 2007). Of course, this may also be the case in narratives that are
obtained through research interviews, which we regard as ‘interactional events’ instead
of as ‘artificial social encounters’ (De Fina, 2009: 237). This not only means that we
incorporate the contributions of the interviewers into our analyses – as these form a cru-
cial part in the process of the construction of meaning (Holstein and Gubrium, 2003) –
but also that we take the implications of the research interview as a sociocultural practice
into account.
In particular, this implies that it is important to realize that interviewees are usually
well aware why they were selected for a research interview and that this already makes
relevant certain identities that interviewees often orient to, in one way or another, in the
interview itself (Van De Mieroop, 2011). These can then be considered the ‘default iden-
tities’, as they are generally recognized as being relevant to a particular context and
participants in talk are normatively expected to orient to them (Richards, 2006: 60). Just
like in other, ‘real world’-contexts such as the classroom or the medical practice, partici-
pants more often than not tend to construct such default identities (e.g. teacher or pupil).
It is of course important to note that these should not be regarded as monolithic, fixed
identities, but instead they are highly personal constructions which interlocutors may
shift in and out of in relation to the local interactional context, while they may simultane-
ously engage in many different kinds of other identity work. Nevertheless, we argue that
also in research interviews, in which participants are not only expected to enact certain
discourse identities (Zimmerman, 1992) – namely, that interviewers ask questions and
interviewees answer these – the interlocutors also orient to particular default identities on
the situated or transportable identity level (Zimmerman, 1992). These identities are
Van De Mieroop et al. 3
usually somehow made relevant prior to the interview, sometimes even in the form of an
explicit account of why the interviewee was selected, as well as during the interview due
to the interviewers’ identity projections upon the interviewees. And just like a teacher’s
professional identity may be undermined when a pupil questions the teacher’s expertise,
an interviewee’s default identity may be challenged by the interviewer. In this article, we
particularly focus on such cases in which the interviewees’ default identities are at stake.
Of course, there are many ways in which such identity challenges can be dealt with by
interlocutors, but we focus on one particular tendency that we found in our data, namely,
that interviewees explicitly mobilize master narratives in their stories. As research has
shown, narratives are not only embedded in their local, interactional context, but also
within the wider, sociocultural context. When formulating a story, narrators ‘situate that
experience globally’ by drawing on cultural knowledge (Schiffrin, 1996: 168), which,
among others, includes master narratives or ‘big D’ Discourses. These can be defined as
‘socially accepted associations among ways of using language, of thinking, valuing, act-
ing, and interacting’ (Gee, 1999: 17). Of course, master narratives should not be regarded
as deterministic ideologies (Kiesling, 2006: 266), as they can change, be challenged and
countered (Andrews, 2004). Furthermore, what is – and is not – regarded as socially
accepted is a matter of local negotiation, as different social groups may consider particu-
lar ways of thinking as generally accepted, while other groups may not. Hence, making
a ‘tout court distinction’ between what is a master narrative and what is a counter-narra-
tive is often quite difficult (Bamberg, 2004: 353) and it tends to be an etic, rather than an
emic, endeavor (Clifton and Van De Mieroop, 2016).
Such master narratives are often quite elusive, as they are considered as the shared
backdrop against which narrators sketch their stories but which is rarely made explicit in
the interaction itself. This is why various means to tap into these generally shared ways
of thinking about the world have been suggested (see for example, De Fina, 2013;
Georgakopoulou, 2013). However, in our dataset, we observed that narrators regularly
made their ways of interpreting how the world works explicit. This not only offered an
interesting insight into the ways in which interlocutors constructed these discourses and
how they related them to the local interaction, but it also struck us (1) that this tended to
happen at moments during which the interviewees’ default identities were challenged
and (2) that these master narratives were formulated as categorical narratives and cate-
gorical statements. In this article, we aim to explore in detail how these master narratives
are mobilized in the interviewees’ stories and how they function in the local interviewing
context. For this, we draw on a geographically widespread, yet thematically similar,
dataset of interviews that is described in the following section, after which we present
detailed analyses of a few selected extracts.
Data and method
The data for this article comprise 36 semi-structured interviews with women employed
in top positions in various organizations. Central themes of all these interviews, which
were initiated by the interviewers in the course of the interactions, were the interviewees’
professional success as well as, and in relation to, the fact that they were women. The
interviewers probed for these topics by asking for the interviewees’ views on women in
4 Discourse & Communication
the workplace in general, as such typically eliciting argumentative discourse, while also
inquiring about their personal experiences related to this topic, which typically resulted
in the formulation of various types of narratives.
The interviews were conducted over the last 9 years in three different geographical
contexts, namely, in Croatia, India and Belgium.
1
Even though it is clear that these three
datasets cannot be considered as globally representative at all, the similarity of the strate-
gies with which the interviewees from these different contexts, each with different soci-
etal norms, deal with these identity challenges, illustrates that the phenomena we discuss
in this article are not unique for one particular social context. The language of the inter-
views was English, except for the Belgian data which are in Dutch. All the interviews
were transcribed using conversation analytic transcription conventions (Jefferson, 1984).
We analyzed these interviews using narrative analysis from an interactional sociolinguis-
tic perspective (cf. De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2012). As mentioned in the introduction,
in these preliminary analyses, we paid particular attention to investigating these research
interviews as interactions, thus incorporating a critical scrutiny of the formative role of the
interviewer in this socio-communicative event (Van De Mieroop and Clifton, 2014).
In this article, we present fragments that were selected from three interviews, which
we briefly discuss in more detail here:
Interview 1 was conducted in Croatia in 2007. The interviewee was in her early
30s and had been working in the business field since her graduation. At the time
of the interview, she was the only high-ranking female employee in the company
and she was also the first one who had managed to climb the career ladder as high
in this organization. In the interview, she focuses a lot on her paving the way for
younger female employees and the effort it has taken to reach that position and,
above all, to be taken seriously in this male-dominated world.
Interview 2 was held in India in 2013. The interviewee was in her 40s and she had
worked at various (quasi-)governmental institutions before joining a high status
educational institute where she held a senior position in administration. This is
quite exceptional for a woman, as the workforce in India for high-skilled jobs is
still strongly male dominated (for more details, see Chatterjee and Van De
Mieroop, 2017; Sehgal et al., 2013). Importantly, the interviewee relates that she
had to resign from one of her earlier jobs because she was verbally harassed after
she had refused to comply with her male boss’ orders.
Interview 3 took place in Belgium in 2011. The interviewee was in her early 40s
and was a high-level employee of an international company in the financial
domain, which she describes as a ‘man’s world’. As is also discussed in the inter-
view, only few women make it to the level the interviewee is at and this becomes
a focal point in the discussions in the interview.
Analyses
Introduction: Constructing default identities
In the course of these interviews, the interlocutors construct many different identities. In
this article, we focus on one of these, namely, the construction of the interviewees as