Prof. Melisa Stevanovic, from Tampere University (Finland), will visit ReDICo at the University of Potsdam and hold a guest lecture entitled Telling a supervisor about experiences of gendered dismissal: Problems of documentation, tellability, and failed authority.
If you are interested in social interaction and inequalities in the workplace, come and join us!
See the abstract below.
When? October 16, 2023, 4:00-6:00pm.
Where? Campus Neues Palais, Room 1.11.2.22
Melisa Stevanovic is Associate Professor in Social Psychology at Tampere University and Docent in Sociology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She has conducted a series of studies on collaborative decision-making in naturally occurring interaction and in experimental settings. Her research focuses on social interaction, conversation analysis, joint decision-making, power, authority, inequalities, and interpersonal synchrony.
Abstract:
Difficulties of documentation characterize many problematic experiences of social interaction. Here I consider such difficulties by analyzing a case in which an employee tells her supervisor about the gendered dismissal that she has experienced at work. Using video-recorded performance appraisal interviews as data and conversation analysis and positioning analysis as methods, I examine how the experience of gendered dismissal lends itself to a documentable issue. I describe the process by which the problem that the employee initially described as an organizational leadership issue became redefined as a personal matter, which was not the responsibility of the supervisor. I show how this happened by the supervisor refraining from treating the employee’s problem as ‘tellable’ on its own terms, which led to the employee repeatedly changing her storyline. I argue that the persistence of inequalities in organizational interactions may be due to documentation difficulties, which are anchored in cultural expectations that bias the tellability of events in ways that promote gender inequality.
For more information, please contact Milene Mendes de Oliveira & Mario Antonio Tuccillo
at redico@uni-potsdam.de