Edited by Dorien Van De Mieroop and Stephanie Schnurr
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 69] 2017
► pp. 407–426
This article examines interactions between employers in Lima, Peru, and their household workers who are generally perceived as unskilled (Fuertes, Rodríguez and Casali 2013). Using a constructionist approach (Bucholtz and Hall 2005), I explore the household workers’ struggle to negotiate professional identities using directives in task-oriented situations. Directives are associated with higher professional ranks in the workplace (Holmes and Stubbs 2003), thus indexing power. The data consists of audio-recorded interactions between household workers and their employers. The analysis of these interactions shows that household workers use directives to position themselves in non-subordinate roles with their employers’ consent. In using directives, workers take charge and assert their knowledge with certain tasks to claim expertise power (Vine 2004) and create a more professional or skilled work identity.