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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. 407–426

Chapter 22
Household workers’ use of directives to negotiate their professional identity in Lima, Peru

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.
Keywords: directives, expertise power, household workers, professional identity, language negotiation, work identity negotiation
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Domestic service in Peru
  • Frames, relational work and directives in discursive negotiations of identity
    • Directives and their strategic employment for identity negotiation in the workplace
  • Data and analysis
    • Address systems as markers of power differences between household workers and employers
    • The household workers’ construction of expertise power employing directives
    • Self-initiated directives
    • Invited directives
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Appendix
  • References
Published online: 26 April 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.69.22del
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