Identity construal : emblems of identity and conviviality in elite professional services

Abstract

This study examines how identity is construed in elite professional services at networking events in Hong Kong. Using linguistic ethnography and drawing on foundational frameworks of identity construal and indexicality, it also uses conceptualizations of eliteness, self-presentation, small talk, and conviviality. Data were gathered by recording two networking events for elite professional services and then conducting follow-up interviews where participants commented on conversation excerpts. Participants emically identified conviviality and emblems as key aspects in identity construal.

Interactants orient to the categorizing emblems of identity that appear often in the self-presentation sequence, typified by the question ‘what do you do?’. For professionals from different industries meeting for the first time, these tend to be professional emblems such as industry and organization. For professionals at the same firm, professional emblems include roles and hierarchical position, but also more personally valenced emblems such as places traveled. These emblems’ indexicalities in highly diverse Hong Kong may or may not align with the more shared, potently indexical values of insiders or in their spheres of origin. The translatability of these emblems varies widely with some recognizable, shared, and potent and others absent or vague. For some emblems, such as organizational names, actors accurately predict unrecognizability and gloss synoptically for industry and scopically for size or geographic range. Emblems serve to claim eliteness through the gratuitous mention of high status emblems, distinction from experiences that are banal in original contexts but differentiating amidst similar shared elite profiles, and transnational mobility that is habitual and presumed. Even with less than full recognition and shared indexicality, emblems are foundational for participants’ interpretations of identity.

The other aspect is conviviality: lively, festive, cheerful, spontaneous, and informal interaction that is seemingly low stakes and phatic. This interaction style is achieved by a mélange of linguistic features, for example, for liveliness, a faster rate of speech and near continuous talk. Nonparticipation in this style can be attributed to an inaccessibly fast pace, misrecognition of activity type, differing ideologies of conversation management, or absent/partial socialization into enregistered norms. Production of conviviality does not necessarily equate with achieved conviviality, defined as some blend of belonging, social ease, happiness, enjoyment, or relaxation. When achieved, the conversational trajectory can shift to allow a hybrid social/professional relationship that foregrounds the interpersonal, potentially imbuing the relationship with more social obligations.

Achieved conviviality and/or certain emblems produce an identity that makes ‘a person worthwhile to know’ and extend an interaction resulting in tangible outcomes. Thus, the linguistic impacts the social, but likewise, the social impacts the linguistic in influencing the social value attached to various emblems and the stylistic features which make up conviviality. The underlying social structures, however, are largely unremarked on, by interactants, with deployed emblems considered individual meritocratic achievement. By the same token, conviviality is one aspect of an elite global professional/social register that is both typical and typically unremarked. As such, its current power and cryptic operation impact professional success/failure in a surreptitious manner making any intervention in its alteration complex and challenging.