Power Politeness and Gender in Managerial Communication in Indian IT Workplace

Abstract

newline Email communication is one of the most common and useful mediums of communication newlinein modern workplace for sharing formal/official information (Alafnan, 2014). It is newlinecommonly used in most business transactions - both, internal and external - to plan, newlineorganise, direct and control people and activities of the organisation. Managers adopt newlinevarious strategies of power and politeness in their communication to suit different contexts newlineand situations. This study attempts to analyse email corpus gathered from different IT newlineorganisations to explore the usage of politeness and operation of power in managerial newlinecommunication of managers in Indian IT context; it also attempts to find out if there are newlineany gender differences between men and women managers in the way they make linguistic newlinechoices to express power and politeness. This research exclusively focuses on the moves of newlineappreciation and criticism functions within the internal email communication in Indian IT newlineworkspaces. newlineThe theoretical framework for this study is drawn from the concept of politeness using newlineBargiela-Chiappini F.(2006), Watts J. R., (2003) framework of first order and second order newlinepoliteness and power from Bargiela-Chiappini F. (2006) and Clegg (2000) model of power. newlineThis study employs the following analytical tools: Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) newlineby Halliday M.A.K. and Matthiessen, C (2004), Appraisal analysis by Martin and Rose newline(2003), Move analysis by Bhatia (2004) and Swales (1990). Key linguistic systems like newlinetheme-rheme, subject position of the move and lexis play an important in the operation of newlinepoliteness and power in the email communication (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004). newlineThe researcher first gathered the email data (315 emails) from six IT organisations in newlineTelangana, Bangalore and Tamil Nadu states after shortlisting the organisations that were newlinewilling to share the data. The researcher changed the specific confidential details such as newlinenames of the organisations and managers into generic terms as part of confidentiality newlineagreement with