Nick Wilson

This chapter analyses the linguistic practices of two coaches of a rugby team in New Zealand, specifically examining how they employ personal pronouns, familiar address terms, and personal names to navigate the dynamics of player-directed communication. Building upon existing research, the study contrasts coach-talk during training sessions with match days, highlighting the strategic use of language in different contexts and with different addressees. Adopting an interactional sociolinguistics framework and drawing upon linguistic ethnography and corpus linguistics, the analysis reveals that the choice of personal pronouns, particularly the pseudo-inclusive first-person plural we, serves to foster an illusion of inclusivity while mitigating potential face threats associated with directives. Moreover, familiar address terms, such as mate and bro, are shown to enhance relational solidarity, while personal names specify addressees in multi-party interaction and provide a direct means of engagement but are rarely used in dyadic interaction. The findings illustrate that coaches’ referential choices play a crucial role in constructing team identity, managing power dynamics, and enhancing communication efficacy within a sporting context, and that the specification of addressee and person reference plays a central role in the discourse strategies they adopt to enact leadership.

This chapter uses qualitative and quantitative analysis of interactions collected in a New Zealand rugby team to analyse the way in which pronominal choice impacts upon the social dynamics of leadership discourse. In particular, the pseudo-inclusive first person plural pronoun is examined in terms of its solidarity enhancing effect and mitigation of leadership-focused speech acts. Pronominal use is analysed with reference to the sociolinguistic concept of stance alignment and how this can mitigate potential face-threat. The discussion considers that by including themselves with the addressees of an interaction, leaders can attenuate the illocutionary force of speech acts such as directives and criticism, whilst maximising the directness of their expression, and goes on to question the social function of pseudo-inclusive compliments.

This chapter discusses how we might identify workplace research as Linguistic Ethnography (LE) by pinning down a set of criteria that define LE, namely: aims, method and impact. Broadly speaking any research using ethnographic methodology, focusing on authentic data pertaining to language in use, and giving something back to participants, can be considered as LE. Whether it is explicitly styled as such is another matter. Examples of research that can be categorized in this way are discussed and used to highlight the flexibility of LE as an approach to workplace research.

Using the concept of distributed leadership, this paper demonstrates not only that having multiple leaders in an organisation is an effective way of structuring leadership, but that it allows for a range of Leadership styleto be performed, each of which meets the immediate needs of a Community of practice within an organisation. Leadership is shown to be a skill that is acquired through situated learning, and it is through the analysis of Leadership discourse that we can see how different leadership styles are developed and negotiated at a local level. Thus, by analysing leadership Discourse in a rugby team, this paper challenges the Stereotypeof the ‘born leader’ and adds further weight to the idea that multiple leaders in an organisation is not only a useful strategy, it is also one that can support leadership emergence and development from within an organisation.

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.