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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 30:3 (2020) ► pp.326–350

Identity (self-)deconstruction in Chinese police’s civil conflict mediation

ORCID logo | Nanjing University
| Nanjing University

While recent pragmatic research on identity in discourse mainly focuses on ubiquitous construction of one’s own or others’ identity, inadequate attention has been directed to the frequently occurring deconstruction of self-constructed and other-assigned identities. Drawing on transcripts of recordings of 19 Chinese police officer-mediated interactions, this study examines what, how and why self-constructed and other-assigned identities of police officers are deconstructed. Qualitative analysis of the data shows that Chinese police officers’ self-constructed non-institutional identities were often deconstructed by disputants via negating their contextual appropriateness or their social or institutional rightness, whereas police officers also often deconstructed the institutional identities assigned to them by the disputants via negating the validity of the assigned institutional identity or the institutional relationship. It is argued that the cause of this identity deconstruction phenomenon is rooted in police officers’ identity dilemma arising from social changes regarding police work in China.

Keywords: institutional discourse, identity, pragmatic identity, identity deconstruction, mediation, Chinese police mediation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Previous research on identity deconstruction
    • 2.2Previous research on Chinese mediation
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Research questions
    • 3.2Data collection
    • 3.3Data analysis
  • 4.Results of the study
    • 4.1Disputants’ deconstruction of police officers’ self-constructed non-institutional identities
      • 4.1.1By negating the appropriateness of the identities for the institutional setting
      • 4.1.2By negating the social rightness of the identities
    • 4.2Police officers’ deconstruction of identities assigned by the disputants
      • 4.2.1By negating the validity of the other-assigned institutional identity and clarifying a non-institutional identity or communicative goal
      • 4.2.2By negating the institutional relationship and claiming a non-institutional relationship
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 3 June 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.19039.fen
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