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In: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

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

Published online: 26 April 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.69.22del
Abstract
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.
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
References (40)
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