Interaction without walls: Analysing leadership discourse ...

Interaction without walls:Analysing leadership discourse

through dramaturgy and participation1

Nick WilsonCardiff University, United Kingdom

and Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Goffman’s dramaturgical model of interaction is often used to examine howcommunicative events are framed differently in public and private settings.However, this idea has restrictively been conflated with specific spatiallocations. This paper contends that it is not the place where discourse isperformed that styles it as front or backstage, but rather the stances takenin interactions, and the participation framework involved. Furthermore,backstage can be used to negotiate stances later performed frontstage,where they may index wider, ideological aspects of identity. This isdemonstrated through the analysis of a sequence of linked backstage andfrontstage interactions that involve two rugby coaches. The extractspresented and analysed take place in a New Zealand rugby team, a type oforganisation in which space is particularly fluid. The dramaturgical modelis demonstrated to be of use in examining leadership discourse withinorganisations, particularly in organisations in which multiple leaders exist.

KEYWORDS: Backstage, discourse analysis, stance, rugby,ethnography, leadership

INTRODUCTION

The distinction between public and private space is often clearly marked bydiscrete physical locations that seem purpose built to house them. An exampleis the staff-room in educational institutions (Richards 2010; Vaughan 2007).However, in other organisations such locations do not exist and it is up to theparticipants involved to style interactions as public or private using theinteractional resources available to them. Such events are often not onlyrelated to the focal activity of the organisation, but to each other as well. Inother words, public and private events, or to use the terminology of Goffman’s(1959) dramaturgical model, frontstage and backstage, can be viewed as twosides of the same coin. This paper explores the linked nature of frontstage andbackstage interactions in the context of an organisation in which most

Journal of Sociolinguistics 17/2, 2013: 180–199

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activities take place in the same space: a rugby team. In doing so it seeks todecouple the notion of front and backstage discourse from that of physicallocation, and examines how the participants style the events they take part inas front or backstage, in reaction to an ever-changing participation framework(Goffman 1981; Goodwin 2007; Kendon 1990; Rae 2001). Since this paperfocuses on the discourse of two leadership figures in the rugby team, a furtherimplication is that the division of communicative events into front andbackstage allows an analysis of the preparation of leadership and theperformance of leadership.The section that follows explains how stance and identity is used in

this paper, with a discussion of the existing treatments of frontstage andbackstage in interactional research then provided, outlining how Goffman’sdramaturgical model of interaction can be applied to spatially dynamicorganisations.2 This is linked to frames, footing, and participation framework(Goffman 1981; Goodwin 2007; Kendon 1990; Rae 2001) and the utility ofretaining the division between front and backstage (Wittenberg-Lyles et al.2009). The main body of the paper then presents analyses of three linkedcommunicative events in a rugby team. These analyses demonstrate how theparticipants move seamlessly between front and backstage events as theparticipation framework changes. The examples provided also demonstratehow the main participants, the coaches, use backstage events to prepare forhow they will act in the corresponding frontstage event.

IDENTITY AND STANCE

This research adopts the social constructionist paradigm that identity is notstatic; it is recreated dynamically, with reference to situation, context,interactional goals and the evaluation of interlocutors (e.g. Benwell andStokoe 2006; Bucholtz and Hall 2005; De Fina 2007; Holmes 2006; Kiesling2001). Furthermore, identity may be viewed as an accumulation of stancesover time, where stance is a momentary snapshot of the identity that isconstructed in a given interaction (Jaffe 2009). While stance may be regardedas the position that an individual takes towards a subject in discourse, such asa topic, a person or a relationship (Bucholtz and Hall 2010; DuBois 2007;Johnstone 2009), it may also be linked with style as a recurring stance, oftentied to a specific situation (Johnstone 2009; Kiesling 2009). A particularperson may routinely use a variety of different styles, each of which has beencreated through the repetition of a particular stance in similar situations.These styles are identifiable through the features of the person’s speech thatmay in turn index other, more macro features of identity such as gender orethnicity (Bucholtz and Hall 2005; Coupland 2007). To summarise, stancemay be viewed as the first move in the intersubjective negotiation of identity(Jaffe 2009), with style as the re-occurring realisation of this in terms oflanguage, and identity as the way these are viewed in relation to more

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ideological constructs such as macro-level identities and social groupmembership.The construction of identity through the accretion of stances can also be

related to the concepts of frontstage and backstage. Actors in the frontstage firstnegotiate their respective stances in the backstage, before enacting a jointperformance of identity (Wittenberg-Lyles et al. 2009). This can be seen in thedata presented here, in which two rugby coaches are the focus, but may equallywell be applied to examples such as office colleagues discussing their approachto a meeting beforehand (Mirivel and Tracy 2005), or to medical practitionersdiscussing a patient’s casenotes with each other before speaking to the patient(Wittenberg-Lyles et al. 2009). Essentially, what this means is that theinterlocutors in the backstage align their stances with respect to an upcomingfrontstage interaction. In other words, they share an interactional objective. Inthe case of the rugby coaches, this objective is to perform the task of coachingplayers in a rugby training session.

FRONTSTAGE AND BACKSTAGE

Research that views communicative events as frontstage or backstage hastended to focus primarily on backstage discourse, which is analysed as a site ofoff-record identity construction in which individuals are able to take greaterrisks with the stances they adopt (e.g. Coates 1999; Hughey 2011). This paperbuilds on this idea by demonstrating the resultant stance in a frontstage event.Backstage and frontstage are often described as discrete physical locations

(Richards 2010). However, this paper demonstrates that no such limitationneed be imposed upon the concept. Instead, it is proposed that frontstage andbackstage can be used as a way of linking together communicative events,providing a means by which intersubjective stances can build up an identityacross interactions. Additionally, these concepts can explain how the functionand participation framework of an interaction is dynamically created throughthe stances that individuals take within it.

Frontstage/backstage or public/private?

Backstage and frontstage effectively describe the difference between linkedpublic and private communicative events (Abbott-Chapman and Robertson2009; Coates 1999; Hughey 2011; Richards 2010). They could also bedescribed as frames (Goodwin 2006; Rae 2001) that participants use toconstruct their stance3 in the interaction. It is not just the immediate context ofthe interaction and the shared history of the people involved that helps toconstruct these frames, but also the participants’ perceptions and constructionof the participation framework that encompasses the interaction. Theparticipation framework views the non-verbal aspects of interaction such asposture, gesture and spatial dynamics as crucial to the interpretation of any

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spoken communication (Goodwin 2006; Rae 2001). For example, aninteraction can be designed as private through the use of hushed tones, byinward-facing body posture, and by close proxemics (Kendon 1990; Norris2004; Rae 2001) – all features that can be used to prevent other people fromhearing what is said and construct the status of each interlocutor in theparticipation framework. A public interaction, on the other hand, needs anaudience: a ratified set of addressees who may or may not participate in theinteraction (Goffman 1959; Mondada 2009). Moreover, the configuration ofwho is involved in an interaction, whether they are interlocutors, audience, oreavesdroppers (Bell 1984), is as much a part of the participation framework asthe way in which they behave within it (Kendon 1990; Rae 2001).Private (backstage) events may take place in a particular place, such as an

enclosed room away from any potential eavesdroppers (Richards 2010;Vaughan 2007). However, as demonstrated by my research, this need notnecessarily be the case. In fact, by creating a participation framework to stylediscourse as private, an interaction can be constricted as such even when ittakes place in a space that is also used for public discourse.The reason for distinguishing two different types of interactional frame as

frontstage and backstage is not simply to emphasise a public/privatedistinction, however. It also serves to link events together so that acommunicative event that takes place within a wider participation framework(i.e. a public interaction) can be analysed in conjunction with a prior event inwhich a subset of the participants prepare the stances that they will take(Wittenberg-Lyles et al. 2009). Furthermore, the use of the dramaturgicalmodel is especially appropriate when investigating organisational discourse asit can be used to view the interactional work involved in ‘doing’ theorganisation’s business as frontstage, and the interactions that talk about‘doing’ as backstage. This second reason for the application of front andbackstage is discussed further below.

Relevance to organisational function

In the study of interaction in organisations, notably in medical or educationalsettings (e.g. Richards 2006; Vaughan 2007; Wittenberg-Lyles et al. 2009),the frontstage is considered to be where the actual business of the organisationtakes place: in the medical world doctor-patient encounters are the mostcommonly analysed frontstage interaction (Roberts 2006). Backstageinteractions on the other hand are interactions in which the communicativework between professionals takes place in preparation for such encounters(Wittenberg-Lyles et al. 2009). Staying with research on clinical encounters, ameeting of nursing staff discussing the status of the patients on a ward could beconsidered as a backstage activity (Lazzaro-Salazar forthcoming). Similarly, anexample from education would be teachers talking to each other about theirstudents (Vaughan 2007). However, frontstage and backstage, with the



emphasis on the latter, have also been applied to more personal domains ofinteraction, such as family dinner conversations (Blum-Kulka 1990), or talkamongst adolescents (Abbott-Chapman and Robertson 2009). What links theconcepts is the underlying theme that backstage interactions carry with themless risk for the interlocutors (Coates 1999). In other words, they may revealinformation about themselves and use fewer face-saving discourse strategiesthan they do in public, on the frontstage. One difference between theapplications of the terminology in professional and in familiar contexts is that itis hard to identify the main focus, or business, of a social group such as afamily or friendship group. It is likely that this is the reason that, in thesecontexts, it is backstage that seems to be the focus of discussion.

Towards a participation-based model of frontstage/backstage

One of the motivations for analysing communicative events as frontstage orbackstage is that it relates to the division between preparation andperformance, with these closely following the distinction between public andprivate space (Tanner and Timmons 2000). A further idea, which this paperexplores, is that a frontstage interaction can be analysed as fulfilling abackstage role in relation to a wider context. For example, a meeting that takesplace within a professional organisation may be regarded as frontstagediscourse since the actors within it perform various identities concerned withachieving a business-related task. Furthermore, there are likely to have beenbackstage interactions between some or all of the meeting’s participants whichacted as preparation for the meeting; these would be backstage interactions(Holmes and Marra 2004; Mirivel and Tracy 2005). However, the meetingcould also be analysed as backstage discourse if its function was to prepare fora task involving a wider audience, such as negotiations with suppliers, or anypublic facing tasks. Thus, the distinction between frontstage and backstageevents could be seen as relative to the constellation of events in which aparticipant plays a part, that is, an event can only be backstage for aparticipant if they are also involved in the frontstage event. A differentparticipant may have a separate event which functions as a backstage to thesame frontstage event. The events described in this paper are analysed asfrontstage or backstage from the perspective of the rugby coaches.In addition to the different possible constellations of events in which a

participant may take part, another point that is central to my analysis offrontstage and backstage events, and which further demonstrates theimportance of the participation framework as a defining factor in constructingthis, is that backstage events can overlapwith frontstage events. An example thatdemonstrates this is given later in this paper, in a backstage conversationbetween coacheswhich overlapswith frontstage interactionswith players. Thus,rather than discrete locations defining backstage and frontstage, the samelocation can be dynamically used as both, highlighting that it is the discursive

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activity, and the participants involved, that construct an interaction as eitherfrontstage or backstage (Ainsworth, Grant and Iedema 2009; Iedema andScheeres 2003; Mondada 2009).In summary, the frontstage categorises communicative events that are central

to the identity of the team as the discourse of ‘doing’ rugby. These consist ofaddresses by the coaches or captains to the team, and events in which (generallyspeaking) multiple participants are involved. In essence, a frontstage event musthave an audience, as this is a part of what makes the event public (cf. Bell 1984).The backstage on the other hand, refers to the discourse that takes place separatefrom this, as preparation for the frontstage. Typically this takes place betweenfewer speakers. As this paper shows, the backstage negotiation of stances to betaken in the frontstage enables the coaches to construct an identity as leaders inthis team. However, in doing so they also index existing stereotypes of rugbycoaches in their discourseandmovebetweena rangeof different stances. Indeed itmaybe seen that someof thework that is doneby thecoaches in thebackstage is tonegotiate what kind of coach identity they are going to perform in the frontstage.

FIELDWORK METHODOLOGY

The data used in this research is drawn from a larger investigation into thediscursive realisation of leadership and team identity in a rugby club. Using anethnographic approach to fieldwork, I gained full, unrestricted access to a rugbyteam in New Zealand over the course of one rugby season, (from March toAugust). During this time, I not only gained the trust of the players and coaches,but also learned a great deal about the routine practices thatmade up the cultureof the team. This built upon my existing socio-cultural knowledge of rugbygained as a former player, a factor which also facilitatedmy entry to the researchsite (cf. Agar 1996; Hammersley and Atkinson 1983; Schensul, Schensul andLeCompte 1999). Once I had been fully accepted into the team, a series ofrecordingsweremade, capturing targeted interactions on sevenmatch days, andthree full training sessions. The latter were recorded using four digital voicerecorders, each of which was worn by either a player or coach. It is from thetraining recordings that the data for this paper is taken. Through myethnographic engagement with the team, I gained a perspective on the localsocio-cultural meaning of interactions that is as close to the players and coachesas possible, moving from observer to participant in the acquisition of socialunderstanding (Agar 1996). As is common practice in ethnographic research onlanguage (Rampton 2007; Scollon and Scollon 2007), this ethnographicallyacquired social-cultural knowledge has been drawn upon when analysing theway in which stances are created in the discourse of the coaches.During training sessions I typically stood near to the coaches, thus able to

overhear (and sometimes take part in) their conversations. By positioningmyself in such a way, I noticed that the coaches routinely switched betweenbackstage conversations about what to do next or team selection, and



frontstage interactions directed towards the players. I was also able to notewhere the coaches stood in relation to each other and to the players.The team involved was a Premier-grade club team in New Zealand. Premier

grade means that they represented the highest level of competitive rugby atclub level. Note that club rugby is classed as amateur sport as none of theparticipants are paid to take part. In effect, however, these players were all onestep below professional rugby, with many players subsequently embarking ona professional rugby career in the years following the fieldwork component ofthis research. The team’s name for themselves (in a club context) is the ‘Prems’and it is this that will be used throughout this paper, although it should bepointed out that this is a generic term used in New Zealand rugby clubs,somewhat equivalent to the way in which ‘Firsts’ (for first fifteen) is used inrugby clubs in Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England.The Premswere coached by two individuals, Tommo,4 the head-coach and

Parky, the assistant-coach. Although Tommo was officially the most seniorfigure in the team, Parky is not only older, but also far more experienced as arugby coach, having previously coached professionally. Tommo on the otherhand is an ex-professional player, making the move from playing rugby intocoaching. Parky, therefore, acted as Tommo’s coaching mentor in manyregards and this relationship is evident in their discourse and the sharedapproach they took to the team leadership. In addition, there were seniorplayers that occupied captaincy roles within the team.5 A noteworthy point,however, is that the Prems, like all rugby teams, are divided into twopositional groupings, forwards and backs. Tommo is an ex-forward andhence leads forward-specific training drills, while Parky is an ex-back andlikewise leads back-specific training. However, both coaches also led variouswhole team sessions, often with one leading the session and the other givingadvice to individual players.6

CONSTRUCTING LEADERSHIP BACKSTAGE

If we consider the whole scope of interactions that take place within the Premsas a stage, then certain interactions are performed to the whole team or subsetsthereof, such as huddles, team meetings and explanations of training drills.These can be considered frontstage in a team context. Related interactions thatoccur within a smaller, more involved participation framework can becategorised as backstage. Backstage interactions are not public to the wholeteam; they are typically conversations including two or three individuals.However, they are pertinent to the construction of identity frontstage as well,because it is here that much negotiation takes place between individuals,particularly in terms of relative status.In the following examples, the two coaches, Tommo and Parky, are the

focus. Tommo volunteered in an early interview that he sees Parky as acoaching mentor, someone with whom he can check his ideas. Since

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Parky’s ‘day job’ is concerned with the professional development of rugbycoaches, it is no surprise that he steps in to a mentoring role so easily andcan often be seen acting in this capacity. However, he also fulfils his role asan assistant coach by doing more of the detailed work with the players,such as running warm-ups and analysing individual strengths andweaknesses. This takes place in training, where he provides immediatefeedback to the players and after matches, when he analyses a video of thematch and compiles a statistical breakdown of the various performanceindicators that are used to measure individual player performance. Thus,while Tommo does have the final say in all decisions, he tends to seekParky’s advice in team decisions and keeps him informed of any plans hehas regarding training or game-play.Example 1 illustrates Parky performing one of his detailed duties in leading

the players through a fitness drill. This drill has been assigned to the players asa form of punishment for poor match performance. At the beginning of theextract Tommo has just arrived (late) while Parky has been running thetraining session for about twenty minutes.

Example 1: Tommo and Parky7

1 Parky: alright ?2 Tommo: yeah3 Parky: they’re not liking me4 Tommo: [laughter] nah ?5 Parky: I said they’re not liking me6 Tommo: == oh that’s alright7 they’ll get over it8 Parky: yeah I know9 Tommo: I just had a um -10 Parky: == we did a (ball lining) warmup11 and they were fucking atrocious12 Tommo: just attitude or just switched on -13 not switched on ?14 Parky: just not switched on

While much of the interaction in Example 1 functions as a greeting andsolidarity enhancing small-talk (Mirivel and Tracy 2005), it is also used byParky to convey to Tommo the leadership identity that he has constructedwith the players in leading them through this drill. He tells Tommo that theplayers are not liking me (lines 3 and 5), thus indicating that he has taken atough stance, deliberately losing popularity with the players in order to makethem do fitness work, an unpopular but accepted part of training. Althoughthe decision to do fitness training had been jointly taken by the coaches on anearlier occasion (Tommo informed me in an interview that he and Parkyalways jointly plan the content of the training sessions in advance), Parky



further justifies the need to play ‘bad cop’ by explaining that the players hadalready been performing poorly in training (lines 10 and 11). Between themParky and Tommo then agree that this is down to lack of concentration ratherthan attitude on the part of the players (lines 12–14), although as the eventsthat follow this conversation show, Tommo’s suggestion that it was down topoor attitude (line 12) may have been accurate.In their backstage discourse, the coaches construct a shared identity as leaders

in the rugby team through the stances they take towards each other and thefuture frontstage stances they negotiate. By updating Tommo on the stance hehas so far taken with the players (Example 1), not only does Parky make the firstmove in the negotiation of stance (i.e. he claims the role of ‘bad cop’), but hedefines this interaction as backstage. In confiding to Tommo that the players are‘not liking him’ (Example 1, lines 3 and 5), and telling Tommo that they are ‘notswitched on’ (line 14), Parky initiates a discussion about the players, and howthey are training. As training itself is a frontstage activity, this styles theinteraction between the coaches as backstage. The participation framework ofthe event facilitates this because even though they are standing beside theplayers, they are sufficiently far away to prevent their conversation from beingheard when talking at normal volume.In Example 2, however, the participation framework alters, with players regularly

moving within earshot of the coaches, and on occasion interacting with them.

Example 2: Catching cheaters

1 Tommo: {[to players] good work boys good work[claps]}2

3 Tommo: {[to Parky] Tui’s running4 alright … Ara’s here ..5 I didn’t hear from him ..6 I text him and say - }7 Jeff H: == sit ups or push ups ?8 Parky: up straight9 .. push ups10 .. up straight Jeff11 .. come on12 Tommo: stretch Jeff up to the sky mate13 .. that’s it14 Jeff H: how many of these ?15 Parky: twelve16 Parky: {[to Tommo, whispered] just um …17 what .. we .. what we want to do18 is just count a few of them ..19 they should be doing twelve20 burpees twelve push ups}21 Tommo: == oh yeah

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22 Parky: == see like Jeff is just coming in23 now to start24 Tommo: yep25 Parky: and just see if any of them26 cheat … and just .. don’t say27 anything but just ..28 for at the end29 Jeff C: how many push ups twelve ?30 Parky: yep = twelve = of each31 Tommo: = twelve =32 twelve of each33 … come on let’s get them34 right down and right up

The way in which the coaches move seamlessly between frontstage and backstagein Example 2 provides a very clear example of how the participation framework isdynamically reconstructed in interaction and the way in which the social roles ofthe participants are reconstructed by the function of the interaction. When playersinitiate interactions with the coaches (lines 7, 14 and 29), it forces the coaches tomomentarily break-off from their private conversation, reconstructing theinteraction as frontstage through the shift in participation framework. However,this is not purely because of the interruption. It is in part the change in theaudience of the interaction, which moves from just the coaches (who previouslywere talking in hushed voices, and standing quite close to one another), to anyonewithin earshot of the players’ loud questions and the coaches equally loudresponses. That no effort is made to keep these interactions private (in contrast tothe hushed tones earlier) quite clearly marks them as frontstage, but also, andimportantly, they are relevant to the current activity. It is therefore the intersectionof participation framework and relevance to organisational goals, in concert withthe performance of particular leadership identities that constructs the interruptionswithin this example as frontstage. The questions asked by the players areappropriate to the business of training and may be interpreted as the players takinga stance of engagement with the activity and demonstrating that they are trying tofollow the instructions they were given. This is interesting given that the backstagediscussion that has been taking place concerns whether or not the players weredoing the required number of exercises. This raises the question whether or not theplayers who interject are aware of the coaches’ conversation, which of coursecannot be ruled out. Indeed one could surmise that Jeff C, in particular, is trying tosignal that he is not cheating when he answers his own question (line 29).That the coaches alternate between utterances directed at players and their

conversational turns (e.g. lines 1–6) and immediately respond to interruptions,demonstrates that although they are engaged in a private, backstageconversation, the fluidity of the performance space that they inhabit allowsthem to seamlessly move into frontstage interactions and back, all of which isimmediately focused on the training session. This last point is important, as



relevance to the frontstage is part of what constructs an interaction asbackstage. If the coaches were discussing some other topic, such as recounting astory about another coach (an example discussed inWilson 2011), this might beimportant for the way in which they use stance to construct their relationship asleaders in the team, but the conversation would not function as the backstage tothe current training session, although it may function as the backstage to someother frontstage interaction. In other words, any private conversation could beclassed as backstage so long as it is concerned with what happens in a frontstageevent. For example, during a training session Tommo and Jon (the team captain)had a private conversation about how to deal with some discipline problemswithin the team. The outcome was that Tommo agreed to address the wholeteam at a later time. Therefore, this event can be analysed as backstage inrelation to the later performance it discussed, but, unlike the examplesreproduced in this paper, it is not the backstage to an immediate or simultaneousevent, but to a later performance. This underlines the reason for the selection ofthe events described in this paper; because the frontstage and backstage eventstake place in the same location, and over a short period of time, the link betweenthe frontstage and backstage can be clearly established.The next example, which shows what happens after the players have

finished the drill, further exemplifies the way in which Parky and Tommojuxtapose tough and supportive leadership identities, following through on theplan to catch out the players that cheated in the drill.

Example 3: Cutting corners (the players are standing on a line marked on thepitch facing the coaches, having completed the fitness training exercise)

1 Parky: those guys that did it in twenty2 well done3 .. what I’d like um -4 what I’d like you to do5 is anyone who took a short cut in6 that .. anyone who didn’t do7 … their burpe -8 the correct number of burpees9 .. or anyone who didn’t do their10 correct number of push ups11 .. or anyone who didn’t run12 .. to the line13 .. so they cut the er length of14 the field short by a metre or ()15 or whatever16 .. I want you to stand on that17 side of the line18 [after about 30 seconds of19 deliberation almost every player20 steps across the line]

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21 Tommo: anyone that if you you took any22 shortcuts at all whether it’s half23 a metre24 or missed a burpee25 or missed anything26 that side if you didn’t27 this side if you did28 [all players that hadn’t29 previously moved, do so now]30 Parky: okay what’s that telling us guys ?31 Jeff C: (we’re) cutting corners32 Parky: what does it tell us ? Will ?33 Will: cutting corners34 Parky: where does that get us ?35 All: {[muted] nowhere}36 Parky: okay ..37 in the corner38 [players assemble in corner of39 pitch and drink some water.40 Tommo goes to them]41 Tommo: good work ..42 good work big fellas ..43 just push this one out eh …44 good stuff ..45 just you stick to that pace and46 keep some consistency that’s what47 it’s all about .. that’s good ..48 fucking .. it hurts now49 but it works eh ?50 Parky: in the corner come on .. come on51 Steve52 Tommo: good work big fellas .. come on53 …54 Parky: a good effort is an honest effort55 that’s all Tommo and I ever ask of you56 … every Saturday57 … alright …58 so give us an honest effort ..59 give us a Hennie Muller8 please60 .. away you go

Example 3 shows that the backstage strategy that Parky suggested toTommo in Example 2 of watching for who has cheated at the fitness drill,results in a frontstage leadership stance for Parky of a hard-line, authoritativecoach, while Tommo, although supportive of Parky’s stance, repairs thedamage that this approach may have caused to team morale. This worksbecause Parky and Tommo communicate their leadership roles and decisions



to each other backstage. Doing so allows them to present a united front whenperforming frontstage, with each coach adopting different but complementaryleadership stances. For example, the strategy of asking players to repeat back tohim their understanding of events or interpretations of the implications oftraining drills is one that Parky uses frequently, often when training withthe backs and may be regarded as indexing a somewhat old-fashionedauthoritarian coaching style (Bennie and O’Connor 2010; Gourley 2003).Parky’s questioning of the players precedes a change of focus in this event,

which is marked by his use of the discourse marker okay (Schiffrin 1987). Hethen directs the players to assemble in the corner (line 37), where the waterbottles are located. Prior to this, and since finishing the twenty minute fitnessdrill, the players have not had the opportunity to drink any water and are allunderstandably thirsty. That Parky exercises control over when the playerscan drink in this situation is perhaps one of the greatest demonstrations of hisundisputed power over the players in training situations such as these. It isalso a further way in which he constructs his leadership in this situation as‘tough’.Tommo on the other hand, supports Parky by clarifying his instructions and

when all of the cheaters have been caught, addresses the forwards, referring tothem as big fellas (lines 42 and 52). He compliments them for their effortswhich may be interpreted as undermining Parky slightly, but an alternativeanalysis is that Tommo is repairing some of the damage that has been done inpunishing the team as a whole. Although every player stepped across the line,this was a demonstration of solidarity rather than an indication of guilt (I wasalso watching who cheated). It may be that Tommo is covertly complimentingthe forwards on this display of solidarity, although it is impossible to know forsure. However, Tommo also supports the exercise in his comment it hurts nowbut it works eh? (lines 48 and 49) showing that even though he may respect thesolidarity of the players, they must still face their punishment – a HennieMuller. In the final part of the extract (lines 55–60) Parky constructs an us/them boundary between the coaches and players, which serves to furtheremphasise the coaches’ position of power (cf. Holmes and Marra 2002).

DISCUSSION

As noted in the introduction to this paper, the underlying rationale behinddescribing organisational discourse in terms of front and backstage, ratherthan simply as a series of different frames (Goffman 1974), is that it provides alink with the way in which leadership identities are constructed andperformed. Whilst leadership discourse has not been overtly foregrounded inthis paper, the use of the front/backstage analysis can be of use to researcherstrying to unravel the interactional construction of leadership identity,particularly in situations with multiple leaders such as co-leadership, sharedleadership or distributed leadership structures (e.g. Holmes, Marra and Vine

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2011; Vine et al. 2008). By analysing talk between leaders as backstage andthe discursive performance of leadership duties on an organisational level asfrontstage, a thread of continuity between events is maintained that representsa focus on organisational goals. This is important for the study of leadershipdiscourse, as one of the driving factors in analysing leadership discourse is thatit is of relevance to the needs of leaders, and one of these needs is how theirleadership behaviour enhances the business of their organisation (Bolden2011; Holmes, Marra and Vine 2011; Ladegaard 2011; Schnurr and Chan2011).This paper departs from existing organisational discourse research that has

utilised the concepts of front and backstage by questioning the presumed linkwith location. In the rugby team, backstage talk can take place in the samelocation as the frontstage event it is concerned with. While Richards (2010)restricts the backstage in his school-based research to the staffroom and thefrontstage to the classroom, this link between location and performance maysimply be a feature of the research environment on which he focuses. Myresearch suggests that the split between frontstage and backstage has less to dowith location and more to do with the audience involved and the stance takenby the participants to each other and to their audience.I have shown that frontstage and backstage can be used to analyse the

construction of an interaction as public or private. Example 2 demonstrateshow the same space can be constructed as both frontstage or backstage,alternating between the two dependent on addressee, linguistic features suchas the volume of speech, and aspects of the participation framework such asproxemics, posture and gesture of the interlocutors (Filliettaz 2004; Norris2004). Therefore, in an organisation that routinely changes location andworks without walls, privacy is discursively constructed. That stance isnegotiated backstage prior to being performed frontstage is shown in the waythat Tommo and Parky establish a ‘good cop/bad cop’ routine in theirbackstage interactions, and carry this through to the frontstage performanceshown in Example 3.In the frontstage interaction (Example 3), the coaches each take different

stances towards the players, with Parky indexing a coaching stereotype of anauthoritative coach through his use of unmitigated directives and hisadmonishment of the players, while Tommo indexes solidarity with theplayers through his use of familiar address terms and a linguistic style moreakin to that of the players. It can be seen from the way Tommo and Parky planto catch the players that are ‘cheating’ (Example 2), that an important featureof the way in which backstage conversations are used in the Prems is to planhow to act in the frontstage (Coates 1999). Not only do the coaches negotiatetheir relative stances, with Parky taking charge in this instance, but theydiscuss what they are going to do. That Example 2 is also interspersed withcomments directed at players demonstrates how the coaches can move easilybetween frontstage and backstage, enacting a frontstage stance of greater or



lesser affiliation towards the players, while maintaining the backstageconversation in which they construct the stances they take towards eachother.Example 3, on the other hand, highlights the notion that an event can

function both as frontstage and backstage. In other words, whilst it is thefrontstage to the coaches backstage discussion in Examples 1 and 2, it canalso be viewed (especially for the players) as the backstage to the interactionsthat will take place on the next match day. Indeed, all training sessioninteractions, broadly speaking, could be constructed as backstage to theevents that take place on the match day, as this is the primary business of theteam: their raison d’̂etre. Thus, we could view the range of rugby-focusedcommunicative events that take place within the Prems as linked together,but the categorisation of each event as frontstage or backstage relative towhich event it is linked to. This chain of communicative events can beanalysed using the dramaturgical model by following the perspective of aparticular participant, or set of participants, across a small number of events,as we have done here.The stances taken by the coaches in these interactions, aside from signalling

their interpretation of the interactional frame and the participation framework,also index particular identity featureswithin the context of the rugby team. Someof these are stereotypes, such as the authoritarian coach stereotype enacted/constructed by Parky in Example 3, and draw upon ideologies of orthodoxmasculinity in sport (Anderson 2009). Indeed, from an indexical point of view(Eckert 2008; Ochs 1990; Silverstein 2003), the stance taken by Parky and theway in which he administers a rebuke and punishment, may be indexed by theteam as representing institutional discourse (in particular that of education), itmay index ideologies of hegemonic masculinities if we consider that Parky isP�akeh�a9 whilst the majority of the players are M�aori (MacLean 1999).Simultaneously, Tommo adopts a more relational stance (Fletcher 1999;

Holmes and Marra 2004), that both indexes and constructs a closeness withthe players based on his age and the stances he routinely constructs in hisother interactions with the players. However, the stances taken by the coachesin Example 3 are negotiated in the backstage events that precede it. In these,the affiliative stances that Parky and Tommo create with one another throughtheir collusion in ‘catching cheaters’ underpins their joint performance ofleadership in the frontstage in which they adopt different but complementarystances. This has relevance not just for leadership and interaction in a rugbyteam, but (as noted above) more generally in organisations in which multipleleaders exist.

CONCLUSIONS

At the outset of the fieldwork for this research the importance of the spatialorganisation of the participants was not the initial focus. Had it been, an effort

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would have been made to capture the details relating to the shiftingparticipation frameworks more closely than could be achieved withethnographic fieldnotes. With this in mind, further research on the constructionof leadership identity in relation to participation frameworks could benefit froma method by which movement and proximity is captured either through the useof video footage, or as I have suggested elsewhere (Wilson 2011), through theintegration of an electronic position and orientation relay (e.g. similar to GPS)in the recording equipment (cf. Cunniffe et al. 2009). Were I to conduct furtherresearch on this topic, this is certainly the approach I would take.However, the goal of this paper has been to re-examine the usefulness of

the frontstage backstage model of discourse, as applied by numerousorganisational discourse scholars. Whilst further study which takes greateraccount of exact spatial positioning may uncover further links between theway in which participation framework helps to style an event as public orprivate, the main finding of this paper has been the influence that theinteractions between participants in the backstage have upon the stancesadopted in the frontstage. Furthermore, the notion that backstage andfrontstage are entirely separate, or linked to specific spatial locations, has beenchallenged through the demonstration that such events can overlap.Frontstage and backstage retain their usefulness as analytical descriptions ofcommunicative events, however, because this allows us to see events as linkedto one-another. Additionally, in the context of organisational and institutionaldiscourse, the idea of business-centred discourse is built into the concept. Thisleads to a link with leadership discourse, in that the investigation of howleaders manage their interactions between each other and with their followersallows for a greater understanding of what makes for effective leadership.

NOTES

1. Thanks to Janet Holmes and Meredith Marra for their help with early drafts ofthis article, and to the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of the Journal ofSociolinguistics for their comments and feedback which have shaped the finalpaper.

2. Spatially dynamic organisations are organisations in which events take place invarious ad hoc locations, and in which geographical movement is a routineelement in the pursuit of the organisation’s business. Examples include sportsteams (as here), tradespeople, delivery workers, and salespersons.

3. Goffman’s term footing could be used here, as it is linked closely to the idea offraming, however, given that I have already discussed identity in terms of stance,this term is used here as the two terms express very similar if not identical ideas(Bucholtz and Hall 2005).

4. All names are pseudonyms.5. However, as this paper focuses on the discourse of the coaches, the complexity of

this structure is not examined here.



6. Further details about the routine practices of the players and coaches can befound in Wilson (2011).

7. Transcription conventions:? rising tone, indicating question.. pause of half a second or less… pause of between half and one second= mmm = indicates overlapping speech== indicates latching onto previous utterance- interruptions, self-corrections and false starts[coughs] noise or action (e.g. [opens door]){[laughing] Idon’t know}

noise or action that overlays speech. Also used to giveextra information about speech e.g. {[louder] what ?}

8. A Hennie Muller is a punishment drill named after a famously hard-line SouthAfrican coach. It involves running along one length of the pitch, across thediagonal, up the other length and back across the other diagonal to the startingcorner.

9. A term used in New Zealand to refer to New Zealanders of European descent.

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Address correspondence to:

Nick WilsonCardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy

Cardiff UniversityHumanities Building

Colum DriveCardiff, CF10 3EU

United Kingdom

[email protected]



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