Cover not available
Part of
Identity Struggles: Evidence from workplaces around the world
Edited by Dorien Van De Mieroop and Stephanie Schnurr
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 69] 2017
► pp. 317–334

Chapter 17
Adapting self for private and public audiences

The enactment of leadership identity by New Zealand rugby coaches in huddles and interviews

Struggle is inherent in social interaction and meaning making. The argument proposed in this chapter is that rugby coaches face a struggle when moving between private-facing (intra-team) and public-facing aspects of their leadership role, due largely to the need to adapt to shifts in the interactional frameworks and goals of these different settings. Using a bottom up, comparative genre analysis of the linguistic behaviour of coaches in a private-facing coaching interaction (the half-time team huddle) and a public-facing interaction (the half-time media interview), we locate linguistic differences that potentially hint at this struggle. The findings of this analysis suggest that coaches need to discursively realise a shift between their role as motivator (in private-facing interactions) and their role as public representative of the team (in public-facing interactions) and associated tasks and goals that come with enacting their coaching role in these different settings. The need to present themselves differently in these two settings can be seen to complicate the role of the rugby coach.

Keywords: rugby coaches, sports discourse, leadership, private-facing interaction, public-facing interaction
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Background: Leadership identity in sports
    • Private and public identity performance in (professional) sport
    • The current study: struggling with interactional settings
  • Data and methodology
  • Findings
    • Differences in leadership tasks
    • Realisation of coaching speech acts: assessments of confidence and performance
    • Realisation of coaching speech acts: criticising acts
  • Discussion
    • Getting it right: adapting speech across the private/public divide
  • Conclusion and implications for leadership research and future research
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 26 April 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.69.17fil
References
Altheide, David
1984 ‘The Media Self’. In The Existential Self in Society, edited by Joseph Kotarba and Andrea Fontana, 177–95. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Alvesson, Mats, and Stefan Sveningsson
2003 ‘The Great Disappearing Act: Difficulties in Doing “Leadership”’. The Leadership Quarterly 14 (3): 359–81. doi:DOI logo.Google Scholar
Becker, Andrea J.
2009 ‘It’s Not What They Do, It’s How They Do It: Athlete Experiences of Great Coaching’. International Journal of Sports Science and Coaching 4 (1): 93–119. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carter, Neil
2007 ‘“Managing the Media”: The Changing Relationship between Football Managers and the Media’. Sport in History 27 (2): 217–40. DOI logo.Google Scholar
Chiles, Tina
2007 ‘The Construction of an Identity as “Mentor” in White Collar and Academic Workplaces: A Preliminary Analysis’. Journal of Pragmatics 39 (4): 730–41. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Duszak, Anna
ed. 2002 Us and Others: Social Identities across Languages, Discourses, and Cultures. Pragmatics & beyond. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
File, K. A.
2012 ‘Post-Match Interviews in New Zealand Rugby: A Conciliatory Media Interview Genre’. New Zealand English Journal 26 (1): 1–22.Google Scholar
2015 ‘The Strategic Enactment of a Media Identity by Professional Team Sports Players’. Discourse & Communication 9 (4). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goodger, John
1986 ‘Ritual Solidarity and Sport’. Acta Sociologica 29 (3): 219–24. DOI logo.Google Scholar
Gourley, Michael
2003 The Psychological Edge in Rugby: Leadership and Motivation in Coaching Team Sports. Auckland, New Zealand: Human Synergistics.Google Scholar
Heath, Shirley Brice, and Juliet Langman
1994 ‘Shared Thinking and the Register of Coaching’. Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register, edited by Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan, 82–105. New York: Oxford University Press US.Google Scholar
Hinton, Marc
2010 ‘NZRU Reprimands Ma’a Nonu for Swearing’. Stuff.co.nz, May 6, sec. Sport. [URL].
Holmes, Janet
1984 ‘Modifying Illocutionary Force’. Journal of Pragmatics 8 (3): 345–65. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet, and Meredith Marra
2004 ‘Leadership and Managing Conflict in Meetings’. Pragmatics 14 (4): 439–62. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet, Meredith Marra, and Bernadette Vine
2011 Leadership, Discourse, and Ethnicity. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012 ‘Politeness and Impoliteness in Ethnic Varieties of New Zealand English’. Journal of Pragmatics 44 (9): 1063–76. DOI logo.Google Scholar
Holmes, Janet, Stephanie Schnurr, Angela Chan, and Tina Chiles
2003 ‘The Discourse of Leadership’. Te Reo 46: 31–46.Google Scholar
Scheibman, Joanne
2004 ‘Inclusive and Exclusive Patterning of the English First Person Plural: Evidence from Conversation’. Language, Culture and Mind, 377–96.Google Scholar
Schnurr, Stephanie, and Angela Chan
2011 ‘Exploring Another Side of Co-Leadership: Negotiating Professional Identities through Face-Work in Disagreements’. Language in Society 40 (02): 187–209. DOI logo.Google Scholar
Sznycer, Karolina
2010 ‘Strategies of Powerful Self-Presentations in the Discourse of Female Tennis Players’. Discourse & Society 21 (4): 458–79. DOI logo.Google Scholar
Vealey, Robin, and Britton Brewer
2009 ‘Confidence in Sport’. In Handbook of Sports Medicine and Science, Sport Psychology, edited by Britton Brewer, 43–52. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Vine, Bernadette
2009 ‘Directives at Work: Exploring the Contextual Complexity of Workplace Directives’. Journal of Pragmatics 41 (7): 1395–1405. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wieczorek, Anna Ewa
2009 ‘This Is to Say You’re Either in or out: Some Remarks on Clusivity’. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines 3 (2): 118–29.Google Scholar
Wilson, Nick
2013 ‘Interaction without Walls: Analysing Leadership Discourse through Dramaturgy and Participation’. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17 (2): 180–99. DOI logo.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 5 other publications

File, Kieran & Stephanie Schnurr
2020. Towards an Understanding of Linguistic Consultancy: How Do Linguists Approach the Task of Evaluating Sociolinguistic Practice in Consultancy Sessions?. In Professional Communication [Communicating in Professions and Organizations, ], ► pp. 291 ff. DOI logo
Schnurr, Stephanie, Kieran File, Daniel Clayton, Solvejg Wolfers & Anastasia Stavridou
2021. Exploring the processes of emergent leadership in a netball team: Providing empirical evidence through discourse analysis. Discourse & Communication 15:1 ► pp. 98 ff. DOI logo
Wilson, Nick
2017. Developing Distributed Leadership: Leadership Emergence in a Sporting Context. In Challenging Leadership Stereotypes through Discourse, ► pp. 147 ff. DOI logo
2018. David Caldwell, John Walsh, Elaine W. Vine, & Jon Jureidini (eds.), The discourse of sport: Analyses from social linguistics. London: Routledge, 2017. Pp. 240. Hb. £110.. Language in Society 47:3 ► pp. 464 ff. DOI logo
Wilson, Nick & Joshua Wedlock
2023. Swearing as a Leadership Tool. English World-Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 march 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.