Master’s thesis

Title: “I have the deck”: Power and style in the discursive production of leadership by individuals of marginalized gender and sexual identities

Motivation: In the “Report of the comprehensive review of the issues associated with the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’” (Department of Defense, 2010), a question which appeared in the survey and answered by approximately 115,000 service members asked, “In your career, have you ever worked in a unit with a leader you believed to be homosexual?” (p. 180). Nearly 72,000 service members responded “no” while nearly 43,000 service members responded “yes”. Respondents of “yes” then were directed to respond to questions regarding the effects of the leader’s sexual identity on their unit’s morale, performance and ability to work together. The 2010 survey which contributed to the repeal of DADT is the only study that investigated in the military the effectiveness of the leadership performance of perceived gay and lesbian service members.

While current scholarship investigating leadership spans across various fields of inquiry, research focusing on the performance of leadership by individuals of marginalized gender and sexual identities remains limited.

Data: Data for this study are narrative excerpts from sociolinguistic interviews I conducted with naval officers, specifically Surface Warfare Officers (SWO), who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA). In total, I conducted fourteen interviews with fourteen different participants. Among the seven cis-male participants, three identified as heterosexual, three identified as gay, and one identified as bisexual. Among the five cis-female participants, three identified as heterosexual and two identified as lesbians. Among the two participants who identified as transgender, one identified as a man and the other as a woman.

Methodology: Each interview lasted approximately 1 hour and questions were organized to facilitate a temporally chronological structure. Questions were also designed to elicit narrative responses. While no interview was identical, they each followed a similar timeline; experience/background prior to USNA, time at USNA, and time after USNA. In order to elicit narratives specifically about leadership, I asked about specific types of authority figures, such as upperclassmen and commissioned officers the participants may have interacted with while at USNA as well as department heads and captains from their first tour. In order to garner narratives about leadership, I asked questions regarding challenging situations while at sea. (Un)surprisingly, these challenging “sea-stories” usually took place on the bridge when the participants were standing watch as the Officer of the Deck (OOD).

Theoretical Frameworks: I first examined how participants discursively constructed leader identities as they performed leadership within their sea stories. Integrating Davies and Harré’s (1990) positioning theory and Och’s (1993) notions of “social identity”, “social acts”, and “stances” in what Bamberg (1997) calls the “story world”, I demonstrate the emergence of a leader identity within each sea story. Through the emergence of the leader identity in the sea story, I suggest the story-teller conveys their leadership style as either self-oriented or relationally-oriented. I argue that within each sea story, the primary goal within the story world is to maintain the safety of the ship. Thus, I argue to portray leadership style within these sea-stories, the story-teller can depict interactions by choosing to include other characters to either demonstrate accomplishing a goal as a relationally-oriented achievement or to focus on the self and describe the accomplishment as an individual achievement. Within these interactions, participants voice themselves and sometimes their interlocutors through what Tannen (2007) calls, “constructed dialogue”.

Results: In my analysis, I found that each naval officer demonstrated what French and Raven (1959) call “expert power”, power derived from knowledge, and “legitimate power”, power derived from institutional role to establish and reify their leader identity. To elucidate the professional practices of standing watch on the bridge as an OOD, I draw on Kristeva’s (1986) concept of “intertextuality” and Bakhtin’s (1986) “chain of speech communication” (p. 94) to ascertain the use of U.S. Navy instructions and phraseology within these sea stories. In other words, the story-tellers demonstrated expert power to construct identity and establish credibility by relying on “prior text” (Becker, 1994) which they “entextualized” and then “recontextualized” (Bauman & Briggs, 1990) into their sea story.

It is not surprising that each story-teller demonstrated their expertise as OODs. Thus, the primary difference between the sea stories was the story teller’s decision to convey a self-oriented or a relationally-oriented leadership style. The two heterosexual men demonstrated a self-oriented leadership style within the story world. Their sea stories reflected the narrative construction typical of men identified by Johnstone (1990), that men often function in the story world as the protagonist. The two men established credibility as naval officers by demonstrating expert and legitimate power in their narratives by positioning themselves relative to their Captain, thereby inferring their significance as only second to the Captain. The one heterosexual woman first demonstrated a relationally-oriented leadership style by positioning herself relative to her Captain and a Conning Officer, usually an officer junior to the OOD, in the presence of an on-coming challenge. However, in a moment of extremis, she resorted to a self-oriented leadership style in order to execute a tactical maneuver. Interestingly, the gay man, lesbian woman, and transgender man each negatively evaluated the self-oriented leadership style of themselves or another character in their sea story. In the case of the gay man, it was his own performance of a self-oriented leadership style which he negatively evaluated. The lesbian woman negatively evaluated the self-oriented performance of another officer when that officer failed to demonstrate the appropriate expertise, or expert power, as the OOD. The transgender man demonstrated a relationally-oriented leadership style while also negatively evaluating the performance of another OOD for also lacking the required expertise. Lastly, all participants, with the exception of the two heterosexual men, provided a coda that brought the listener out of the story world in order to reflect on their performance of leadership.