Vicarious narratives of professionals in Hong Kong (Panel introduction)

Abstract

In this introduction to the panel ‘Narratives of Vicarious Experience in Talk at Work’ we begin with an overview of previous research on vicarious narratives in ordinary conversations to set up the discussion of the forms and functions of narratives of vicarious experience in talk at work. We adopt a broad definition of vicarious narratives as the range of narrative practices surrounding figures other than the narrator proper. The second part of the paper focuses on the role of vicarious narratives in constructing narrator and group identities in an interaction. More specifically, we draw on our on-going funded project on vicarious narratives in talk at work in Hong Kong to discuss how narrators link vicarious narratives to their current context in workplace/professional settings. First person narratives of personal experience have been the staple of research on narratives, while third person narratives of vicarious experience have received considerably less attention. In their early work Labov and Waletzky (1967) make a distinction between narratives of personal experience and narratives of vicarious experience, the latter relate to events not personally experienced but observed or reconstructed from other sources. By comparison with the first person narration, third person narration carries a range of pragmatic/interactional consequences following from the epistemic authority of the narrator, the stance that s/he adopts, the participant roles that s/he performs, and the illocutionary act potential of a narrative. More recent studies have exploded Labov and Waletzky’s simple dichotomy to a whole range of possible types of vicarious stories. Norrick (2013), for example, provides a taxonomy of vicarious narratives in ordinary settings based on the source these narratives derive from, such as observed events, media sources, and the like. Our particular interest lies in vicarious narratives in professional/workplace settings. A lot of research has been done on personal narratives as the prime sites of identity construction. As Johnstone (1996: 56) notes, “the purpose of narrating is precisely the creation of an autonomous, unique self in discourse”. Bamberg’s (1997) work on positioning alludes to the role of vicarious narratives in constructing the narrator’s identity. He maintains that narration involves establishing a moral position for the speaker, ‘irrespective of whether the speaker him/herself plays a role in what is being talked about, or whether the talk is merely about others’ (p. 335). Expanding this idea, we draw on 20 semi-structured interviews with professionals working in Hong Kong to examine the purposes for which people tell vicarious stories in workplace/ professional settings. In our corpus vicarious narratives take on a range of hybrid forms combining features of first person and third person narration; they also display complex relationships between the teller and the protagonist. We show that stories ostensibly about someone else often turn out to be about the teller himself/herself. Indeed, narrators may use stories about others to illustrate their own goals. In conclusion, we discuss a range of discourse and rhetorical devices that narrators employ to achieve their goals in an interaction.