Englisches Seminar, room 13
On Identities, Relational Work and Gender in Business: A Linguistic Case Study of Agile IT
Agile methodologies have become the norm for software development and project management in IT, representing a shift toward collaborative, non-hierarchical and iterative work in cross-functional teams. It has been argued that this increases the space for diversity, but prevailing barriers especially to the inclusion of women are continuously identified in the literature. Linguistic frameworks in interpersonal pragmatics and discourse analysis can provide the level of complexity needed to increase understanding of these phenomena in a setting characterized by gendered discourses and ideologies of agile. Yet, the linguistic practices underlying agile methodologies remain largely under-researched. The present PhD project proposes to address this with a case study of two Swiss and two UK agile IT companies, investigating identity construction and relational work in business interaction reflected in multiple types of spoken and written data. In this talk, I outline the research plan for the proposed study and will report on preliminary findings from interviews with professionals in the field.
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