Covert caution: Linguistic traces of organizational control

This dissertation is a study of managerial language use in an American corporation. Findings build on sixteen months of linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork at Motorola, a high technology corporation based in the Chicago area. The study links micro and macro levels of analysis by bringing the fields of linguistic anthropology and organization studies into dialogue with each other. I argue that although managers at Motorola glorify conflict, a disposition toward caution is actually the unremarked norm in many of their social encounters. At the micro level, I investigate the way caution shapes managers' decision-making practices in team meetings, drawing on three approaches in linguistic anthropology. Using conversation analysis, I examine the linguistic structures which organize managers' interactions. Secondly, I investigate how meeting participants construct agency and responsibility with regard to the decisions being made. Thirdly, I draw on research in language ideologies to examine the kinds of identities which managers perform in these interactions.;At the macro level, I examine the form of organizational control which inculcates a disposition toward caution in managers. The desire for promotion is fundamental to the managerial habitus. Promotion decisions, in turn, are largely based on a manager's reputation, conceived here as symbolic capital. This form of capital circulates across social networks through gossip. Managers' disposition toward caution is due to the fragility of their reputations.;Finally, a concern with how Motorolans construct community is woven throughout the study. My examination extends from the development of face-to-face communities in team meetings, to Motorola itself as an imagined, translocal community.