Abstract
Performance appraisal interviews (PAI) are in a Scandinavian context supposed to be dialogues between equal partners. This implies a focus on the superior and subordinate as conducting a conversation more than an interview, and a focus on development instead of performance. The article seeks to investigate how these ideals are lived up to in the practice of conducting a PAI. On the basis of a corpus of 30 hours of videotaped PAIs and applying a conversation analytical approach, the study shows that interactional symmetries and asymmetries can arise as a consequence of interactional practices that are dynamically negotiated between and agreed upon by the co-participants on a turn-by-turn basis. These symmetries and asymmetries emerge due to the participants’ orientations to institutional and social norms that can intertwine and overlap, thus impeding, postponing or supporting the ideals of PAIs as being dialogues between equal partners.
Keywords
Introduction
Since the early 1990s, performance appraisal interviews (PAIs) have been a widely used management tool. They are strongly acknowledged for their central role in contributing to corporate strategy (Lynch, 2006), and for being an important tool for performance management (Beardwell and Claydon, 2010). Consequently, a vast amount of ‘best practice’ literature in the field (Geller, 2001; Grote, 2000, 2008; Losyk, 2002) has been published aiming from a normative tradition to address practitioners’ needs to gain insight into how to get most value out of PAIs.
In a Scandinavian context, there has been a development from using PAIs to measure performance in the 1990s to focusing on PAIs as a tool for employee development and commitment. This is reflected in the difference between North American and Scandinavian terminology: whereas a recurrent term in the North American context is ‘performance appraisal’ (Allen, 2000; Fletcher, 2001) or ‘performance appraisal interview’ (Nathan et al., 1991), in a Scandinavian context terms like ‘employee development conversation’ or ‘employee development dialogue’ (Aggerholm et al., 2009) are used, thus highlighting the focus on employee development. This change in focus also implies a change in the roles of the actors involved in this form of institutionalized conversation. Whereas the early stages of PAIs supported a clear division of the conversational event between management on the one hand and employee on the other, the current contextualization of PAIs (focusing on development instead of appraising an employee’s past performance, and framing the interaction as a conversation instead of an interview) indicates an intention to create and incline towards a dialogue between equal partners.
In order to shed light on the complex relations between ideals of dialogue and equal partners on the one hand, and institutionalized norms containing hierarchical notions of superior and subordinate on the other, this study adopts a micro-analytical, interactive perspective to focus on the notions of symmetry and asymmetry (Drew, 1991; Robinson, 2001) as concepts with a view to gaining greater understanding of the complex interactional orientations of the participants towards the underlying social and institutional norms in PAIs.
The study is structured in the following way. After an overview of PAIs in a Scandinavian context, the second section presents a literature review focusing on resources for the emergence of symmetries and asymmetries in interaction. In the following analytical section, three excerpts will be investigated. All three of these deal with activities that are central to the overall goals of PAIs, namely to ensure employee development and commitment, and they represent central sequential environments in PAIs for the creation of symmetries and asymmetries in that they make relevant an orientation to both institutional and social norms. The first excerpt is related to the manager giving negative feedback about a specific aspect of employee performance; the second deals with the manager providing positive assessments of the co-present employee; and the third focuses on a manager’s response to an employee’s complaint about a co-worker. The article ends with a discussion and concluding thoughts about the role of micro-practices for the emergence of symmetries and asymmetries in PAIs, and their relevance for understanding the complexity of PAI interaction.
Performance appraisal interviews in a Scandinavian context
PAIs can be defined as ‘once-a-year reviews on employees’ motivation, performance, satisfaction, attitudes toward their companies’ (Nathan et al., 1991: 353). Thus, they are characterized by having a clear time frame (annually) and by entailing aspects of motivation, satisfaction and employee commitment. In a Scandinavian context, the overall framing correlates with North American practice: PAIs are ‘regular, systematic, well-planned and well-prepared’ (Larsen, 2010: 251, author’s translation into English); but one of the main differences is the focus on dialogue (Larsen, 2010: 251).
In a Scandinavian context, in 2006 more than 89% of the largest Danish companies conducted PAIs (Aggerholm et al., 2009), which confirms that PAIs are a well-established management tool. There is a general tendency for more and more companies in Scandinavia to conduct PAIs, but there are indications of an uneven distribution in terms of participants: whereas upper management and salaried workers in more than 90% of the cases are invited to have PAIs, only around 70% of non-salaried workers are offered PAIs (Aggerholm et al., 2009). Another significant difference appears when looking at the amount of time spent on PAIs in relation to different participant groups. Whereas an average of around 1.5 hours are spent on upper management and salaried workers, PAIs for non-salaried workers only seem to last an average of around 40–60 minutes (Asmuß, 2006).
In addition, when looking at some of the few studies dealing with what actually happens during the PAI, some facts indicate that there might be problems in terms of an even distribution of rights to talk. In a Danish context, Scheuer showed that in general subordinates and superiors talk more or less just as much as each other, although superiors tend to talk slightly more than their subordinates (superiors talk for an average of 55% of the time) (Scheuer, 2001). When the PAI is divided into four different categories, relating to small talk, procedure, past and future, it turns out that there is an even distribution in the first two categories and a clear focus on the employee when talking about the past (57%). However, when talking about the future, which is an aspect closely related to the central aim of PAIs (namely employee development and commitment), superiors talk significantly more than their employees (Scheuer, 2001).
In another study, Sandlund et al. (2011) show that when looking in detail at what happens during a PAI, it becomes apparent that the acknowledgement of institutional norms minimizes the range of ways in which subordinates can raise topics related to negative experiences like stress, for instance. This conclusion is in line with another study on PAIs that investigates how critical feedback from the superior to the subordinate is produced in PAIs (Asmuß, 2008). Here it is shown that despite the fact that critical feedback is an institutionalized and thus legitimized activity in PAIs, the social norm stipulating that negative feedback is a socially delicate action plays a crucial role when superiors construct these feedback sequences.
The studies mentioned above indicate that rights and obligations to perform specific actions in PAIs are not necessarily evenly distributed between the PAI participants. In particular, aspects of turn distribution seem to suggest that managers and employees have difficulties in living up to the ideal that PAIs should be dialogical interactions between equal partners. The current article seeks to pursue this line of investigation from an interactional perspective by focusing on the role of micro-practices in PAIs with regard to the emergence of symmetries and asymmetries seen as social constructs emerging in interaction. An investigation of this kind might add to our understanding of the idea that uneven turn distribution constitutes a challenge to equality in PAIs.
The emergence of interactional symmetries and asymmetries
The emergence of asymmetries in talk has been studied in everyday and professional settings, with settings like employment interviews (Glenn, 2010) and doctor–patient interaction (Ariss, 2009; Maynard, 1991; Roberts, 2000; Robinson, 2001) being investigated with particular intensity. Numerous studies have pointed out that symmetries and asymmetries in talk can be results of underlying interactional micro-practices like uneven turn distribution and question–answer formats (Robinson, 2001; ten Have, 1991) or results of the use of audio-visual technologies to support communication (Heath and Luff, 1992). In his study on asymmetries in clinical discourse, Maynard (1991) has related symmetry and asymmetry to macro-concepts like ‘institutional power’ and ‘authority’, and criticizes the latter two for not acknowledging sufficiently the interactional organization of institutional talk. According to Maynard, ‘asymmetry of discourse in medical settings may have an institutional mooring, but it also has an interactional bedrock’ (Maynard, 1991: 486). He thus highlights the fact that institutional norms on the one hand and interactional rights and obligations on the other might intertwine or overlap. Following the notion of asymmetry evolving in and through interaction, asymmetry has moreover been defined as ‘enacted as a situated accomplishment’ (Roberts, 2000: 152), thus focusing on asymmetry as an interactional and collaborative achievement. The current study follows this line of research by trying to understand symmetry and asymmetry as results of the local, embodied interactional orientations of PAI participants.
Several studies address the close relation between interactional asymmetries and knowledge (Drew, 1991; Enfield, 2011; Golato and Betz, 2008; Stivers et al., 2011). Rights to know (epistemic rights) are closely related to aspects of entitlement, and Drew outlines this close relation by pointing out that there is a ‘conventional ascription of warrantable rights or entitlements over the possession and use of certain kinds of knowledge’ (1991: 45). Entitlement has been shown to be closely connected to questions of epistemic stance and morality (Stivers et al., 2011), thus supporting the notion that entitlement is not a predefined category but is oriented to and negotiated recurrently by the participants in interaction through various linguistic means. In relation to proposals, for instance, Asmuß and Oshima (2012) have shown that when proposing future action, an orientation to entitlement plays a crucial role for the decision-making process about the proposed action. In relation to requests, Lindström (2005) and subsequently Curl and Drew (2008) show that there is a close relation between the participants’ display of different degrees of entitlement and their understanding of contingencies to comply with the request. The use of positive and negative interrogative formats when making requests serves as yet another resource for participants in interaction to show an orientation to entitlement. Whereas negative interrogatives are used to mark the speaker’s strong entitlement, positive interrogatives and pure statements mark the speaker’s low entitlement (Asmuß, 2007; Heinemann, 2006). When transferring these findings to the role of entitlement in PAIs for the emergence of interactional asymmetries, it becomes apparent that an entitlement to perform specific institutional actions (like giving negative feedback, providing positive assessments or dealing with complaints) might interfere or overlap with the participants’ local orientations to interactional rights and obligations.
By applying a dynamic and interactional perspective to symmetries and asymmetries, the current study seeks to provide insights into the complex interplay between the social and institutional norms towards which participants in PAIs orient and that have an impact on the opportunity of participants to create a dialogue between equal partners.
Analysis
Data
The data for the current study come from a corpus of about 30 hours of videotaped PAIs in two different organizations including various superiors and subordinates. The data were collected over a period of five years (2005–2009) and transcribed according to conversation analytic transcription conventions (Atkinson and Heritage, 1984).
Delivering negative feedback in PAIs
The first excerpt shows how a superior delivers critical feedback to a subordinate. Despite the institutionalized legitimization of criticism in PAIs, the superior shows an orientation to the critical feedback as being a dis-preferred, thus socially problematic action. This leads to extended stretches of talk where the superior, despite the subordinate’s recurrent displays of understanding, continues his delivery of criticism.
Specifically, the manager (M) criticizes the employee (E) for taking too much time when making presentations at in-house meetings. Instead of sticking to the amount of time the employee was pre-assigned to use, the manager indicates that the employee should be more flexible and use the actual amount of time available in the current situation. The sequence starts after the manager has already announced that he is about to raise some critical issues.
The manager launches his critique by announcing that the issue raised is something he has experienced himself, thereby highlighting and accounting for the authenticity of his criticism:
Excerpt 1a
1
In lines 1–4, the manager launches a problem presentation, and he does so in a mitigated way (Pomerantz, 1984): the actual problem presentation is delayed, and he uses pre-starts to frame the upcoming problem presentation as something he has either done or experienced himself, thus accounting for him to take up the issue. He thereby indicates low entitlement to perform the critique despite his pre-assigned role as the manager delivering feedback to the employee. The actual problem presentation is postponed until line 5 ‘situation-defined presentation technique’, which implicitly indicates that the employee might spend too much time on his presentations instead of adjusting them to the actual time frame left. It is noticeable that the problem presentation is not directly targeted at the employee as something the employee recurrently does, but rather as something the manager in general experiences (Bolden and Robinson, 2011; Robinson and Bolden 2010). Despite the employee starting to laugh, the manager continues the problem presentation:
Excerpt 1b
The employee shows clear signs of problem recognition as early as line 8 by saying ‘aha’, followed by various signs of smile and laughter (lines 12, 19), head nodding (lines 12, 14) and verbal acknowledgement tokens (line 22). Nevertheless, the manager continues his problem presentation without showing acceptance of the employee’s display of understanding the problem. The actual problem is not presented until line 61.
Excerpt 1c
In line 61, the manager actually presents the problem as such ‘it is my impression that there perhaps can be done a little bit more can’t there?’ (lines 61–62). He does so by continuing to frame the problem as something potentially delicate: it is presented as his personal impression (line 61), he uses mitigation (‘a little bit’, line 62) and he does not address the employee personally by using the personal pronoun ‘you’, using a passive construction instead: ‘that there can be done a little more’ (line 62). Once again, his turn is not designed to be completed.
Instead, by using a tag ‘can’t there’ (line 62) followed by a hesitation marker ‘uhm’ (line 62), the manager leaves his turn open so that he could continue the problem delivery. At this point the employee takes over in line 63 in overlap with the manager’s tag and displays his understanding of the problem that has been presented as actually being a challenge he has encountered himself: ‘it is also my impression that … there it took too much time’ (lines 63–67). By doing so, he acknowledges the problem as presented by the manager, but instead of dealing with it as a recurrent challenge, as the manager indicated in line 13, the employee targets one specific occasion, namely the last leader meeting he attended. 3
In this excerpt we can see an orientation by the manager that giving the employee negative feedback is socially problematic. This becomes evident in the manager’s use of mitigation and hesitation, leading to a prolongation of the problem presentation. In terms of entitlement it becomes apparent that even though a manager conducting a PAI ‘formally’ is entitled to provide negative feedback, it seems to be problematic to ‘violate’ basic social norms such as the preference for agreement (Sacks et al., 1974) when actually providing negative feedback. Thus, the manager uses various interactional resources in order to adjust his actions to existing social norms, which consequently leads to him spending significantly more time in the form of turns in the sequence than the employee does.
In other words, an uneven distribution of turns between a manager and an employee does not necessarily need to be an indication of institutionalized inequality between the two participants. In fact, an uneven turn distribution can be a result of an orientation to social norms regarding the delivery of critique, resulting in the emergence of interactional asymmetries, rather than a simple matter of pre-assigned inequality in terms of institutional roles between managers and employees.
Doing positive assessments in PAIs
This section deals with the role of assessments in PAIs for the emergence of interactional symmetries and asymmetries. Specifically the analysis investigates the way in which the employee, by pursuing a personalized assessment of her own performance, shows an orientation to the manager as being entitled and obliged to provide such assessments.
In the excerpt below (2) the manager (M) has just asked the employee (E) about her current work tasks. In response the employee starts by mentioning that she is engaged in general reception work:
Excerpt 2a
The employee’s report in lines 1 and 2 makes an assessment or some kind of acknowledgement by the manager sequentially relevant, and he acts accordingly by producing a minimal acknowledgement token in line 3. Thus, he claims understanding of what the employee has said, but he does not display understanding by giving insight into how he specifically evaluates the employee’s work report (Schegloff, 1982). The employee continues by listing another task, namely ordering products (line 6):
Excerpt 2b
In lines 6–9, the employee elaborates on another of her tasks. She does so by first reporting about her task in a neutral form. As there is no uptake by the manager after this report (line 7), the employee continues by adding an assessable quality to her task-related report (‘as cheap as possible’, line 8). Instead of responding to the assessable, the manager inserts a clarifying question, resulting in a side sequence (Jefferson, 1972).
Excerpt 2c
The employee responds to the manager’s question by simply acknowledging it (line 11), and then continuing her turn by adding one more assessable quality to her task report by saying ‘simply without reflection’ (line 12), which makes an assessment in the next turn conditionally relevant. Yet again, the manager does not take up this opportunity to affiliate by assessing the work task. Instead, he ‘merely’ aligns (on the distinction between affiliation and alignment, see Stivers, 2008) with the report by producing a comment:
Excerpt 2d
The employee rejects the manager’s comment in lines 16, 17 and 19, which results in the manager providing his first direct assessment of the employee (line 20). As this happens in overlap, the manager produces one more assessment directly after the first one (line 21). He does so by simultaneously starting to document their talk by writing something down on the interview guide sheet (line 18). At this point the employee could orient to the manager’s turn as a positive assessment of her work performance and thus proceed to report on another of her current work tasks. Instead, the employee treats the assessment as not sufficient and continues to pursue another one by producing one more assessable (Goodwin and Goodwin, 1987).
Excerpt 2e
After the employee’s assessable ‘I’m probably a bit too mean’ in line 23, the manager takes over and produces one more assessment. The way the assessment is done this time is as an upgraded version of ‘good’ in lines 20 and 21 via ‘fant-’ to ‘great’, which is a strong, non-standardized version of a positive assessment (Maynard, 2003). Moreover, in contrast to the first assessment in lines 20 and 21, the manager’s embodied actions now display his attention to the assessment as he suspends his filing activity (line 24). Only when this non-standardized strong assessment has been produced and the embodied orientation correlates with the activity of providing a strong assessment does the sequence moves towards closing. The employee finishes her turn in overlap with the manager’s positive assessment, and the manager ends the sequence by a topic-closing implicative second assessment (line 27).
To conclude Excerpt 2, the employee shows an orientation that the manager’s positive but standardized first positive assessment of her work performance is not sufficient. She continues to pursue an assessment and ends up accepting a version that represents a non-standardized assessment of her personal work performance. In terms of symmetries and asymmetries, we can see that both participants show an orientation to their institutional rights and obligations as employee and manager respectively: the manager pursues and the employee produces assessable reports, and the employee pursues and the manager produces assessments accordingly. Thus, an institutionally relevant asymmetry in the form of uneven distribution of tasks is observable. However, this uneven distribution of institutionalized tasks does not account for the prolongation of the sequence: why is the first assessment produced by the manager not accepted as such by the employee? This cannot be accounted for until the linguistic and embodied aspects of the interaction are considered. In other words, the sequential placement and embodied behaviour of the participants play a central role when performing the institutionalized action, and this interactional organization can help, postpone or hinder the accomplishment of these actions.
Employee complaint about co-worker
In the following excerpt, we can observe another frequent but socially problematic action a manager has to deal with in PAIs. Here, the manager has to respond to an employee’s complaint about another co-worker who is not present. The complaint is made by telling a story, and this specific sequential activity poses, as the analysis will reveal, a number of specific interactional constraints on the manager in terms of how to deal with the complaint.
PAIs have an institutionalized focus on co-present employees, but there are cases in which talk about non-present co-workers becomes part of the overall activity. This is the case in the following excerpt, where an employee complains about a non-present co-worker (see Drew and Walker [2009] about complaints launched by one participant on behalf of another co-present participant). This activity puts specific constraints on the manager’s subsequent actions in that ‘complaining about something is, of course, one way of taking up a stance toward it, and a negative stance at that’ (Schegloff, 2005: 450). It is this inherent stance taking in complaints that puts constraints on the manager as to how to respond as a complaint recipient.
In the excerpt below, the employee (E) produces a complaint about a co-worker by telling a story. For the story recipient, the manager (M), this makes it sequentially relevant to assess the story, while at the same time having to deal with a complaint expressed in the form of a story. As the analysis will reveal, the way the story assessment is done and its sequential placement can contribute to the creation of interactional asymmetries in the PAI.
Before having a closer look at the excerpt as such, the sequential structure of story evaluations are briefly introduced. As Kjærbeck and Asmuß (2005) have shown, the story evaluation sequence starts directly after the delivery of the story’s punchline. The story evaluation is a crucial place for the display of affiliation and disaffiliation, and it consists of a two-step procedure. First, the story’s modality is addressed. This entails that the story recipient addresses the modality of the story (a story to laugh about, to be astonished at and so forth), and subsequently the storyteller acknowledges the story’s modality or refrains from doing so. Once the storyteller has acknowledged the story’s modality, the broader understanding of the story is negotiated. Here, the story recipient places the story in a broader context in order to display what he or she sees as the story’s main message, and thereafter the storyteller acknowledges or counters the way of understanding that has been displayed.
In the excerpt below (3) we can see how the manager (by refraining from engaging in the story evaluation) creates interactional asymmetry in relation to pre-assigned institutional roles. The employee starts a story about a co-worker in which she addresses the fact that the co-worker is putting pressure on some members of the team including the employee herself. Thus the story involves a complaint to the manager about a working team member. The way in which the manager deals with the challenge to acknowledge the story without positioning himself in favour of or in opposition to the co-present employee is in focus in the following analysis.
Excerpt 3a
The employee starts the complaining sequence by putting a frame around it, namely that the story will deal with people at work who are known for creating a bad working and team atmosphere by making insinuations (‘stikpiller’, line 4), and the employee immediately assesses such individuals negatively (line 6).
Excerpt 3b
In lines 18–20, the employee presents the punchline of her story, namely that some co-workers are allowed to take extra training courses instead of the employee herself being allowed to do so. At this point the manager could take over in order to acknowledge the story, but this does not happen. Instead, the employee continues by reformulating the punchline:
Excerpt 3c
The way the employee reformulates the punchline is by pointing to the implicit threat that has been made by the co-worker in question: if the employee takes a decision to participate in the course (resulting in a shortage of places for other participants), the co-worker will leave the team. The punchline makes a response by the manager sequentially relevant. However, in the pause that arises immediately afterwards, the manager does not take over. This noticeable absence of an uptake results in the employee once again expanding her turn:
Excerpt 3d
The employee does so by initiating a negotiation about the meaning of the story. Line 24 ‘yeah (.) hello’ is produced in an idiomatic way (Drew and Holt, 1988), which functions as an appeal to common knowledge that this reaction is ridiculous and does not fit into a professional workplace situation. Still, the manager does not join in by displaying any kind of personal stance towards the story: in line 25 he minimally acknowledges the story, but he does not elaborate on it any further. Consequently, in line 27 the employee addresses the story’s meaning once more by presenting her interpretation of the story ‘this is stupid’. This clear stance taking makes a subsequent next turn by the manager sequentially relevant, and he does in fact take over. But instead of acknowledging the story and thus affiliating with the employee in being right in complaining about her co-worker, the manager refocuses the talk by initiating a topic shift:
Excerpt 3e
The manager does not engage in the negotiation of understanding about the story, thereby refraining from taking a stance by displaying acceptance or non-acceptance of the story. Instead, by initiating a topic shift, he ends the talk about the potentially problematic behaviour of a co-worker and refocuses the talk to deal with the employee.
The excerpt illustrates that complaining about a co-worker in a PAI by means of storytelling is a complex interactional activity. By making affiliation conditionally relevant through storytelling, the manager as the story recipient is placed in a dilemma. While showing affiliation would entail accepting the negative stance towards the non-present co-worker, not affiliating with the story is to be seen as a dis-preferred, thus potentially socially problematic action. By refraining from both affiliating and rejecting the complaint and instead initiating a topic shift, the manager manages to avoid disagreement while refocusing the talk on the employee who is actually present once again.
In this excerpt, focusing merely on turn distribution would reveal that the employee talks more than the manager, thus suggesting that the ideal of the employee being allowed to focus on employee development aspects has been complied with in this part of the PAI. However, consideration of the interactional features of the excerpt shows that the fact that the manager talks significantly less than the employee is a consequence of the local contingencies of talk rather than being a direct result of equal and dialogical ideals of PAIs.
Discussion
The study indicates that looking at the micro-practices of PAI interaction allows insights into the complex interplay of institutional and social norms that managers and employees recurrently orient towards. The study shows that the participants in PAIs both orient and act according to pre-assigned institutional norms, while at the same time orienting to rules and norms related to the organization of talk. Here, aspects like preference organization, sequential placement and conditional relevance have been shown to intertwine with an orientation to institutional norms. As a consequence of these complex interactional orientations, symmetries and asymmetries in PAI interaction can evolve as an outcome of interactional accomplishments that are dynamically negotiated between and agreed upon by the co-participants on a turn-by-turn basis.
When reflecting on the Scandinavian ideal that PAIs should be a ‘dialogue between equal partners’, the study helps us to understand the complex orientations of the participants involved in seeking to accomplish this ideal. Greater acknowledgement of the interactional nature of PAI talk might improve our understanding of why (for instance) the ideal of the talking employee versus the listening manager cannot always be accomplished. Depending on the interactional resources used to accomplish specific activities, the manager might orient to local constraints and obligations related to responding to these activities rather than orienting to the generally acknowledged ideal that managers should primarily listen to what their employees are saying instead of vice versa.
Consequently, the study highlights that a focus on turn distribution in PAIs might not be an adequate criterion to fully account for the complexity of activities involved in PAIs. As the analysis has revealed, not all uneven turn distribution represents a reflection of institutionalized pre-assigned roles only. Instead, looking at the interactional organization of PAIs has revealed that the participants constantly orient to local constraints and obligations set up by the interactional nature of talk. This can lead to extended stretches of talk by either the manager or employee without this necessarily indicating any violation of the ideal that PAIs should consist of a dialogue between equal partners.
Concerning the relationship between concepts like equality and inequality on the one hand and symmetry and asymmetry on the other, the study provides a frame of understanding for how macro-concepts like equality and inequality might arise as consequences of the local organization of talk. Equality and inequality at the workplace have been shown to be shaped by and to shape the local organization of talk taking place at the workplace. Boden (1994) has referred to the way in which micro-practices can contribute to macro-concepts as ‘laminations of actions and reactions’ (1994: 22) that build up the organization. Thus, the study highlights that the investigation of micro-practices used in workplace settings provides us with an understanding of the building blocks involved in the interactional construction of symmetries and asymmetries at work, as well as revealing that these building blocks play a central role in the emergence of larger societal concepts like equality or inequality at the workplace. More studies focusing on the actual practices of workplace interaction and how they contribute to the emergence of interactional asymmetries might deepen our understanding of the complexities and dynamics involved in accomplishing equality at work.
Footnotes
Appendix: Transcription glossary
Based on the Jefferson transcription conventions as described in Atkinson and Heritage (1984: ix–xvi).
right speaker emphasis
YES noticeably louder than surrounding talk
u: stretched sound
ka- sharp cut-off of the prior sound
? rising intonation
, continuing intonation
; small falling intonation
. falling intonation
= latching between utterances and words
> < noticeably quicker than surrounding talk
< > noticeably slower than surrounding talk
↑ rising intonational shift
↓ falling intonational shift
.hh audible in-breath
hh audible outbreath
yehhs laughter in word
(.) micropause (less than 0.2 seconds)
(0.5) time gap in tenths of a second
[yes ] overlapping talk
[no ]
( ) unintelligible talk
(( )) information about embodied actions
Acknowledgements
A great thanks to the special issue editors for making the issue possible and to the anonymous reviewers for their very insightful and valuable comments.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.