Safety Talk and Service Culture: Flight Attendant Discourse in Commercial Aviation.
Abstract
The discourse of commercial aviation flight attendants has historically received no
sociolinguistic attention. To address this gap, this thesis explores how flight attendants
use language in workplace-related contexts to construct their professional identity and
community. I draw on interactional sociolinguistics (Goffman 1981; Schiffrin 1994;
Tannen 1993) and sociological research (Van Maanen and Barley 1984; Williams 1986;
Marschall 2002) to address how flight attendants use language to orient to occupationally
related knowledge and practices which contribute to the discursive construction of
community.
Data come from two sources: 1) A corpus of 150 textual incident reports
submitted by flight attendants to a US government agency which include summaries and
proposed causes of the incidents in flight attendants’ own words. 2) A corpus of 105
unique discussion threads containing 4,043 posts to a website hosting several discussion
forums aimed primarily at flight attendants. The forums are not affiliated with either
government bodies or airline employers and are a virtual space for flight attendants to
discuss aspects of their job away from occupational demands.
Following Bucholtz and Hall (2004), I show how identity is contextually related
and situationally constructed, and emerges from discursive orientations to professional
practice, indexicality, ideology, and performance. Moreover, there are certain
intersubjective relationships embedded in the discourse which emerge from and add detail
to the situational identity constructed through flight attendant discourse. Indexical stances
and ideologies which are grounded in institutional training frame and are heightened in
the discursive performances of the reports and forum posts. These ideologies motivate
and enhance the existing institutional, physical, and sociocultural divisions between flight
attendants and pilots, which may have consequences for intercrew cohesion in emergency
situations.
Authors
Clark, Barbara LCollections
- Theses [3706]