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  • Getting things done at work: The discourse of power in workplace interaction by Bernadette Vine
  • Jennifer N. Garland
Getting things done at work: The discourse of power in workplace interaction. By Bernadette Vine. (Pragmatics and beyond new series 124.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. Pp. 276. ISBN 1588115216. $114 (Hb).

Bernadette Vine’s Getting things done at work seeks to illuminate the relationship between power, language, and context. The book, based on V’s dissertation, focuses primarily on the use of ‘control’ speech acts—utterances, such as directives, requests, and advice, designed to get the hearer to do something—between managers and staff in a New Zealand workplace. The book presents a detailed and useful account of how such control acts and their modifications function in this environment.

The topic, setting, and analysis methods are introduced in Ch. 1. Ch. 2, ‘Directives, requests and advice’, sets up the categories used in the analysis of control acts and discusses subtypes of these categories and the effects of politeness on the forms such utterances take. Ch. 3, ‘Identifying control acts’, lays out the forms of control acts (such as imperative, interrogative, and declarative) and discusses the importance of context in identifying such acts.

Ch. 4, ‘Analysis of control act head acts’, presents largely quantitative results for the frequency of the forms and types of control acts identified in the previous chapters. Ch. 5, ‘Modification of control act head acts’, categorizes and presents the frequency of different types of internal and external modification of control acts used to mitigate their forcefulness. Ch. 6, ‘Exploring control acts in context’, provides a more qualitative exploration of the control acts with a detailed analysis of the way context influences form and type.

Ch. 7, ‘Control acts between managers and their staff’, presents the frequencies of different forms of control acts and mitigating devices in an analysis based on the status of the participants. The results show that although status plays a role, the purpose of the interaction and the participants’ knowledge of each other have a strong effect as well. Ch. 8, ‘Managers and power in the workplace’, explores other ways status can be minimized or marked in the data (including turn-taking, amount of talk, and topic control), presenting a convincing case that the managers in this data have an interactive style of management that tends to empower lower-status participants. Ch. 9, ‘Language and power between equals’, examines the use of control acts between participants of equal status, finding that those in equal-status interactions use many of the same devices the managers do to effectively get things done.

Those interested primarily in language and power or workplace discourse may find that the first three chapters provide more detail about speech act theory and the classification of control acts than is wanted, but the study is thorough and meticulously documented. The final three chapters especially challenge current ideas about politeness and power. The author builds a strong case that the purpose and context of the interaction play a crucial role, perhaps more so than the objective status of the participants in terms of workplace hierarchy, in determining certain features of the interaction typically associated with power.

Jennifer N. Garland
University of California, Santa Barbara.
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